Any comments on using Atomz as in-site search engine?

Need to index about 3000 pages

[irock]

I have a site with 3000 pages... and I discovered Atomz can do spider, index, organize, and send XML result to my server. I was wondering if you have any experience with this paid service.

Anyone can recommend another service for outsourcing in-house search engine?

[Jane_Doe]

I use the free version on three sites. It's great. People use it extensively on each of the sites.

[mack]

If you need a site search why not use an off the shelve script.

A lot of people on these boards like FDSE (fluid dynamics search engine) and i'm one of them.

Spider your site when you want.
Design your own templates
once you pay for the script, no more fees

The script is also available as a shareware version with a link back to the scripts home page.

3000 pages it well within the limits of FDSE. I curently have it indexing 14000 pages and still works well.

[Brad]

Atomz always struck me as a good remotely hosted site search. But frankly, I agree with mack FDSE is better.

[Reno]

I've used AtomZ's free insite search engine for 4 different websites, but none of them exceed the allowable 500 pages. At that level, it is outstanding. But since you are above that level, with 3000 pages, you might want to give serious consideration to the advice that Mack and Brad are offering.

Should you decide however to use a remote search service, I don't think you'll find one better than AtomZ.

[irock]

Actually, I want to find a remote service that can feed XML search result to my server. This is exactly what Atomz can do, and I really like it.

[rogerd]

Irock, have they given you a price for your 3000 page site? I searched the atomz site the other day and they don't seem to list pricing anywhere.

[irock]

All Atomz pricing started at $10k USD.

[rogerd]

Ouch, they really are ignoring the small/medium business market, aren't they? They should take the Microsoft approach - MS sells cheaper products for SMB environments, and hopes that locking the companies in early will lead to more sales as some of the companies grow.

[mack]

That price realy is going way to far.

have you concidered Gigablast?

[rogerd]

They really seem to be missing the boat - I think there are probably quite a few users who would step up from the free product to a relatively inexpensive paid product to get a few more pages indexed, or some advanced features (like algorithm controls).

My guess is, though, that they think that that kind of offering would cannibalize customers for their more costly offerings - we know that the free product is great, so chances are all except the biggest enterprise users could end up with their "low end" offering. Too bad...

[barticula]

Atomz started out pretty cheap. It's only in the last year that they boosted the price. I think the 10k version is for their Enterprise search, which you may need if you have a full 3,000 pages to index.

I'm using their Prime Search service, which I could have sworn costs $2,400 now. It indexes up to 2,500 pages. It works well - better than Verity, which I use in places to get around the 2,500-page limit. But you can't just ignore it. It needs to be constantly tweaked, and if you want to customize the search results it can get pretty complicated because you have so much control over the output.

Excellent ASP service, but it's still an ASP, which means there are occasional problems.

Bart

[phollings]

I have a similar question, so I hope you won't mind my butting in and adding to this conversation.

Adding a search engine to our site is something I know I will have to do at some point -- probably next year. So I'm also looking out for some ideas and checking out my options. At this point I'm still thinking about what functions I want to be able to support. Currently, I'm thinking of:
* maintaining a database of links to sites of interest to my organization's members
* having these links classified as in a directory -- for browsing by topic
* also, having a "Search" interface for our users where they could retrieve relevant content from our website (publications, articles, forum threads, etc.) and also get the links relevant to their query [I suppose that this implies a parallel structure to the directory taxonomy and query keywords?]
* using the links database to drive a spider that would run periodically run to validate links
* ultimately, having the spider detect page changes and be smart enough to pick out the associated text which would be presented to our site visitors as news

Any thoughts on these functional goals? Are they achievable? How? Also, isn't it true that directories and spiders are two different techniques for maintaining and organizing links? Isn't it best to use them in combination? How are they combined?

I ran into a solution today that looked particularly interesting: phplinks. It's opensource and available at freshmeat. It seems to fit part of my requirements. It's claimed capabilities include:
full search capabilities
recursive multilevel site categorization
full referrer tracking
site reviews
site ratings
link validation
related categories
category searching
search term tracking

HTH and thanks for any comments,

Peter Hollings

[Nick_W]

I've used atomz for over a year now. Easy to add to client sites, okay results and pretty much hassle free.

If I were to need something on a big site though, I'd look into FDSE, this isn't the first thread where praise has been given ;)

Nick

[irock]

do you have the URL for FDSE?

Thanks

[mack]

Fdse is available from
xav.com/scripts/search/

[tarheel2002]

I'd recommend the services offered by freefind. It's not the most valuable tool available, however, there's an added bonus... when setting up the account you have the ability to customize your search results page on the freefind.com domain.

If add your site search page (find.html?id=) to your site map it will be indexed by Google. Set up the page with some applicable content and a few links to your site.

This could be the easiest way to earn 5 or 10 fully customizable and risk-free PR8 backlinks for your site.