Enterprise level search solution

Wrensoft’s Zoom MasterNode is a free enterprise level solution for searching massive sets of data (over several million pages), creating portal websites, searching enormous corporate databases, and aggregating multiple search functions into a single search function (also known as federated search).

MasterNode is free and opensource.

How it works

It works as a distributed search application with parallel searching and caching capabilities. It takes search request and divides the work amongst its slave node machines (where the index files of your web content are located). Dividing the work results in better search performance and greater search capacity.

These slave machines can be local machines on the same LAN or remote machines on the internet. The slaves can be running Zoom Search or any other 3rd party search solutions, which support OpenSearch. MasterNode consolidates and ranks the returned search results from these nodes and present them on your web browser.

Ease of set-up

The included set-up utility called MasterNode ControlPanel helps to install and configure MasterNode. It sets up the files necessary for MasterNode and provides a verification process to check that your search slaves are set-up correctly.

Who needs Zoom MasterNode?

MasterNode understands OpenSearch Response format, which is an open format. Therefore, it is able to amass the abundance of web information from the hundreds of OpenSearch web feeds and syndicators. If you wanted to have an aggregator that can search many existing OpenSearch engines, now you can with MasterNode.

You can easily search through millions of documents across many different departments/locations. These "documents" can be PDF files, Word documents, JPEG or PNG images, MP3 recordings, CAD DWF files, HTML pages, dynamic PHP and ASP pages or just simple text files. All you need is to index each department/location using the Zoom Search Engine Indexer (part of the Zoom Search Engine package) and then configure MasterNode to process search request to these nodes. You can add more nodes in the future as demand grows.

With MasterNode, it is easy to bring together many search engines, web accessible databases and web feeders, as long as they are able to provide their search results in OpenSearch Response format (or if they used Zoom to index their content).

If performance is compromised by having your search engine processing massive amount of data, then you should consider MasterNode as it takes search request and is able to divide the work amongst its slave node machines (where the index files of your web content are located), resulting in better performance.

Who does not need MasterNode?

I would not need MasterNode if...

• I want to add a search solution on a CD or DVD. Use the Zoom Search Engine instead.
• I need to consolidate search results NOT returned in OpenSearch Response format. Custom development might be required in this case.
• I have less than 100,000 pages to index.
• I only have PHP or ASP available on my server and not CGI. Use Zoom Search Engine instead.
• I have a Linux-based server. Use Zoom Search Engine instead.

Current Development Status

As of May 2016, this product has been discontinued and is no longer supported. However, it remains open source should anyone want to use it.