Search Engine Code

Where should I start?

[shewhoguards]

I work in a fairly small specialised hobby area. Within that area, there are maybe a few hundred sites at most. There are a few directories, but finding a site with a particular attribute (EG a site focused on blue fuzzy widgets made in 1983) generally means just truging through each one.

I'd like to set up a searchengine to index sites only in my hobby area, and build up a small specialised searh engine on them. However, I have no idea how I would start to go about it. Does anyone know if there's any code already available, or where I should start working?

Thanks

Laura

[victor]

One good place to start is:

[dmoz.org...]

I've used a couple of these myself, so I'm sure you'll find something useful in there.

[ukgimp]

www.searchtools.com/

have a few good products.

I have had some good fun with phpHoo also as a directory. Also comes in ASP flavour.

[emailtools]

I can recommend FDSE (fluid dynamics search engine), a great cgi script - I've used it on my medical search site for over 3 years now without any problems.

It's pretty flexible, lets you specify the sites you want to crawl or specific pages to add, logs the search terms & works on Unix & NT servers.