Simple Search App

CMS or Bespoke?

[aspdaddy]

Do you think a CMS like Joomla or EE or a bespoke PHP/MySQL app is best for this.

I need full text indexing for product searching of 50K-100K records with up to 100 char titles. I would like to add mis-spellings and keywords/tags to improve search. I would like popular searched records shown on the homepage and various search and browse pages e.g Category pages, Advanced Search with Dropdown Lists.

No images, members, ecommerce, limited static pages – just a bunch of search forms and single record pages with breadcrumbs and Adsense.

My main concern is performance of the searching and overcomplicating a simple app with all the CMS set-up/configuration. Also need good import from CSV with integration-hash for updates

What would you use ?

[ergophobe]

I would use a simple bespoke system probably. But perhaps I just don't know the search options available well enough.

I have a site with maybe 15K records, some of which are quite long in the main text fields (like 20 pages if printed out) and have perhaps 20 fields of structured data.

I just have a simple search form where people can put in a query string, then they have dropdowns to select a field to search on and a type of search (begins with|includes|ends with|exact match) and finally a dropdown for choosing the order by field.

Then there's an advnaced form that lets them select multiple searches.

Finally, there's a superuser form that I can use to put in a raw where clause if I need to extract something very special.

There's a fair bit of date - maybe 20 megs - and searches are pretty much instantaneous on any field except the really long text field.

[aspdaddy]

Thanks

Do you know if a CMS adds anything in search/index performance or is just an overhead on the mySQL

[ergophobe]

I don't know really, but in general, the search in most CMS is not that good and the state of the art is to integrate Solr or some other advanced search like that. If you want Google like search for your site, without using Google custom search, I think Solr and the like are the way most people go.

If you want to search structured data by particular fields, I would go bespoke, but there might be something way better. Realize that you will NOT get Google-like search ("did you mean?") from MySQL... although even MySQL has some more advanced search options.