Munax

Munax
Private
Industry Internet, Search Engine systems, computer software
Founded Stockholm, Sweden (2007)
Headquarters Stockholm, Sweden
Key people
 Per-Anders Johansson, CFO and Chairman
Jan-Olof Granlund, CEO
Josef Fung, President China
Eva Jonasson, Economy
Products (See article)
Slogan Find it all in a single mouse click
Website www.munax.com
Audio Video Image search engine

Munax is a Swedish company that develops a Large Hyper-Parallel Execution (LHPE) search engine systems. Munax XE, is an all-content search engine and powers nation-wide and worldwide public search engines with page, document, audio, video, images, software, and email search. Other customers include vertical search engines and mobile operators.

For multimedia, Munax also develops functionality that let the visitors pre-listen to audio and preview videos, making it easier for the visitor to decide what song or video he is looking for before playing it, or visiting the site hosting it. The visitor can also decide to transcode any multimedia file to make it moveable to the mobile phone or any type of multimedia player.

History

After earning his Master of Science in Applied Physics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Jan-Olof Granlund worked several years as an independent consultant when he in 2002 started the work on the specification of the Munax search engine. The goal was to (1) develop a number of new algorithms for ranking, independent of the type of data and (2) efficient distribution and scaling of processing power and data over a large cluster of computers.

The specification for implementation was ready in 2003/04 and the first system (Munax P1) was released in 2005. By that time, a smaller company was founded in the United States for demoing the Munax system and a Munax P1 license was sold to the public search engine Leit.is, the leading search engine on Iceland.

In 2006 the search engine Munax XE was released. Munax AB was founded in March 2007 and has its headquarters in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, with shareholders from Sweden, Iceland, the United States, and China.

Munax features

On the system level, Munax can be installed on a single computer or an arbitrary number of computers on a local area network, or over computers on the internet. The execution is logically distributed over subsystems, not machines. One machine can host several subsystems or one subsystem can span over several machines. This way, Munax can be scaled and distributed freely and each machine's execution power can be utilized to its maximum.

On the indexing level, Munax full-indexes a range of document types, including: htm html shtm shtml jhtm asp php php3 pdf ps doc xls ppt rtf wp wp5 wp6 wpd txt c cpp h. When it comes to link-indexing in Munax, this is more complex than just indexing the anchor text and the URL. Amongst other things, Munax relates each link to the other links on the page and to the text of the page itself. Munax supports the link-indexing of gif, jpg, tga, bmp, iff, img, jif, mac, msp, pcx, pic, tif, ico, jpe, mp3, wav, ram, snd, mp4, aif, mid, vqf, la1, lav, mp2, avi, mpg, mpeg, rm, qt, asx, mov, fli, flc, eps, wri, asc, fmk, for, zip, gzip, tar, arc, lzh, sit, rar, arj, dd, tgz, lha, exe, hqx, dll, vbs, vxd, bat, cmd, class, jar, java, jav and email addresses. Munax knows what type of files these are and groups them accordingly. Munax also allows for structured indexing, i.e. the indexing of xml files and automatically creates each xml tag as an individual search item.

On the search level, several independent ranking algorithms processes the inverted index together with hundreds of search parameters to produce the final ranking for each document.

For the visitor, Munax provides a long range of search features, including the search for pages, documents, audio, video, images, compressed files, torrents, software and email addresses, or to get all type of results on the same page (composite search, supersearch). The visitor can also decide which ranking algorithms to be used, search across domains, search within sites, before/after/between dates, demand objects-on-page, pre-view & pre-listen to multimedia files and view objects-on-page and pages with the tags stripped away.

PlayAudioVideo

Munax started the construction of the PlayAudioVideo multimedia search engine in July 2007 and opened it for beta testers in December the same year. PlayAudioVideo, beta 1, was opened for the public in February 2008 and beta 2 opened in June 2008.

PlayAudioVideo is the first true search engine for multimedia, i.e., providing search on the web for images, video and audio/music in the same search engine. Through Munax composite search, the visitor gets the results for all three multimedia types on the same result page, or he can decide to search for each individual type. Audio and Video can be pre-listened and pre-viewed before connecting to the original multimedia file. This saves time when deciding among versions of the same song or video.

The visitor can start his own web application and make any search result accessible in any type of device. This includes audio for mp3 players and video and audio for mobile phones and/or VCD/DVD.

Mobile and metasearch

Munax has acknowledged the demand from the mobile operators to provide their customers with search beyond the traditional text search. Munax provides the users with the search and play of songs and videos regardless of the type of device being used. For metasearch engines, Munax provides any type of search, including traditional text search (pages/documents) and multimedia search, to be presented on their result pages.

Businesses

Munax provides a range of search products to be installed on a corporation's computers, to index their local area network, their website and/or sites on the web. Munax can be tailored individually to suit the needs for each corporation. Munax also provides outsourced search—i.e., any corporation can have their website indexed and searchable from the Munax search engine, but presented as if the search results came from the corporation itself. With or without authentication and encryption.

Name and logo

MUNAX, from Munin and Corax.
The scientific name for the raven is Corvus corax, as named in 1758 by Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist who invented the system of classifying organisms by Latin. Munin is one of the two ravens of Odin, the god of wisdom in the Nordic Viking mythology (Viking ages 700–1100 AD). The ravens fly over the earth and remember everything; when the ravens come back, they tell Odin what they have seen—similar to the Munax ravens, or crawlers, which inform the Munax database of what's on the web.

References

External links