Site Search

Who has the best?

[Hope]

I have been given the task to find a new search engine for our site. The one we currently have is useless and can't find half of what our site offers.

What do you think is the best to use and why?

[rcjordan]

How big is the site?

added:
Server platform?
Dedicated server?

[Hope]

If we were to include all the file types that we want to be searched it would be about 5,000 items. Platform is currently NT and it is a dedicated box.

[Brett_Tabke]

Those are a pretty hefty set of search requirements.

A good starting point for you is at Avi Rappoport's juicy Search Tools.com:

\http://www.searchtools.com

[rcjordan]

>hefty

Yep. I tried that once (3 years ago -I'm sure there's better software out there now) with *nix search/indexing running on the cron. The indexing swamped the machine. I gave up.

[oilman]

there is always Atomz [atomz.com]. Pretty slick tool. Don't know if it will meet your needs but can't hurt to look ;)

[Air]

Depends a lot on how much you want to spend, is there a budget? You can get into the 100K's and more depending on your needs.

[Hope]

Budget hasn't been set. They want to know all the options and pricing. We have looked a several options so far. At this point I don't like any of the options.

[rencke]

You'll find two here [xav.com] Using the old one - Xavatoria 1.0 here [smorgasbord.se]. Index file appr 2,3 Mb. Haven't tried the other one, which is really 2.0 with a new name and very substantial changes.

[wisser]

Hi,

usually I recommend ht://dig. Yes, it takes time for indexing, but it got so many features (local characters, winword, pdf, fuzzy, synonyms, stemming, ...) and it's free.
If you don't want to go that way maybe the Altavista searchengine is ok. It sure is capable of index large sites, it supports a lot of file formats and it has a well known interface. (Although + and - are now common to all search services, incl. ht://dig).

Hope it helps.

[Marshall Clark]

I signed my site up with Atomz today - it's a great offsite search engine w/a configurable search algo. It seems to work exceptionally well - though that might have something to do with the level of optimization on those pages

it's a lot easier to get rankings when you control the algo isn't it. ;)

[Murrayson]

Alkaline fron Vestris www.vestris.com. Excellent tool and not too expensive $350 free for non-comm use. Fast, stable, and easy to use ... has no GUI it's a port from unix but very relevent results and support multi-site indexing in one index. Loads of help and support. World Health Org even uses it .. 8)

[rcjordan]

>there's always Atomz

I signed up for the 1000-page commercial version yesterday. ($300/yr). Works great, fast returns, good spider control, several easy-to-modify SERP templates. It took about 2 hours to have it going, including digging up the first 200 urls to be spidered. This will serve very well until I can get around to setting up a mysql index/search.

It has a fair site search term report, too.

>it's a lot easier to get rankings when you control the algo

Yeah, nothing like being the top 40 out of 40.