Chapter 1. General Questions

Table of Contents
Is alkaline just another perl search engine? Why was it ever written?
What does the Alkaline source code look like? Can I please get the source code of Alkaline?
What is the Cellular Expansion algorithm? Is there any documentation?
Can I use Alkaline to provide a search engine on files distributed on a CD-ROM?
I don't understand anything and I am bombarding Vestris with email. Nobody has answered any of my yesterday's 25 email messages. Why?

Is alkaline just another perl search engine? Why was it ever written?

No. Not at all. Alkaline is written in C++ and was designed with several goals:

Here's what the original author, Daniel Doubrovkine, has to say:

I started writing Alkaline after weeks of fighting with a dozen of other search engines. I couldn't get a remote site searched properly. Then, those engines that could do the job would become either unusable after a couple thousand pages indexed or would be simply too expensive for my client.

With version 1.1, a new fast search/index algorithm, written by Hassan Sultan was introduced. Alkaline has been constantly improved since the first versions and is always under intensive development.