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Download Sino Manual   Download Sino Source (3.1.17)

Sino (short for "size is no object") is a high performance free text search engine written and maintained by Andrew Mowbray. It was originally written in 1995 and has been mainly used to provide production level search facilities for most of the Legal Information Institutes that form part of the Free Access to Law Movement.

The code in this release is a major rewrite that makes sino much faster and adds new functionality. Sino's features include:

Speed
Sino is very fast both in retrieval and indexing times.

Flexibilty
Sino is easy to interface with via a simple C/Perl API as well as a ready written interactive interface for testing or for actual use on sockets etc.

Portability
Sino is relatively small and easy to understand (about 12K lines of C code). It is ANSI/POSIX.1 compliant and can be compiled 32-bit or 64-bit. Sino concordances (indexes) are portable across platforms with different architectures.

Reliability
Sino has been in use on a number of major web sites answering many millions of requests for the past 10 years and so is robust and reliable.

Free
Sino is open source and is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

System Requirements

Sino has been built using Solaris (Versions 9 and 10 / Sparc and x86). It has also been tested for FreeBSD (gcc 32-bit and 64-bit) and Linux (gcc 32-bit and 64-bit). It is written in a portable way and ought to run on most other platforms with little or no change.

In order to perform well, the indexing side of Sino needs a machine with at least 1G of memory. A machine with 4G will deal with most reasonable physical concordances (up to about 50G of text per physical concordance).

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