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	Sino Free Text Search Engine
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Sino Free Text Search Engine

Sino (short for ``size is no object'') is a high performance free text search engine. 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 (for examples see <http://www.austlii.edu.au>, <http://www.worldlii.org>), <http://www.commonlii.org>, <http://www.bailii.org>, <http://www.paclii.org> et al).

Features include:

• Sino is very fast both in retrieval and indexing times and provided that you have a box with reasonable memory it will out-perfrom just about anything else with full-featured Boolean / proximity searching (see Performance).
• 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.
• Sino is relatively small and easy to understand (about 12K lines of C code including libraries). It is ANSI/POSIX.1 compliant and can be compiled 32 or 64-bit.
• Sino concordances (indexes) are portable across platforms with different machine architectures and operating systems and typically only involve about a half a dozen files that are easy to move around.
• 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.
• Sino is free. It is licensed under the GNU GPL licence.