Setting up a site search function

What are the options?

[Robert Charlton]

My multimedia association is redesigning its website, and I've suggested that they include a site search function for things like archived articles. I have no idea, though, of the best way to do this. I'm not a programmer, though there are programmers in the association we could eventually draw upon.

One thought that comes to mind would be Google's SiteSearch, which I assume is a Google search box confined to the site's domain. The obvious drawback to this might be that there's no guarantee that all of the site will be in Google... though Google continues to amaze me with its thoroughness.

I'd like to get an idea of what the other options are.

PS: I tried using site search on the board to see if anything on this had been posted, and the words "site" and "search" were both considered too common to index. Conceivably this has been discussed before. ;)

[richlowe]

Some good remote site search's include atomz and freefind (i've used both). An excellent local site search is perlfect, which is what I use on my site.

Richard Lowe

[misosoph]

Here are two Webmaster World threads:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

You can also try searching Webmaster World for any of the search engines named in these two threads. That should lead to more names.

Hope this helps.

[Robert Charlton]

Perlfect gets mentioned a bunch of times in the other threads too. I'll pass on the recommendations. Thanks...

[incywincy]

fluid dynamics is a highly configurable search facility , i can thoroughly recommend it.

you can find it at [xav.com...]

[vitaplease]

I know the profs frown upon Frontpage, but should they be using it, it does have its own internal search function exxtension which works fine for me.
(just make sure you exclude private pages, it does not obey robots text ;))

[theboyduck]

If you could get hold of a java programmer then you might be interested in Lucene.

It's an Apache Jakarta project and *very* customisable yet easy-to-understand:

[jakarta.apache.org...]

[mack]

As incywincy said...

Fluid dynamics search engine is an excelent prog.

You can even have it installed on your server automaticaly so there need not be any script set up or configuration. It is very easy to customise and maintain. All admin tasks are through a web interface. The main benefit of running a search script on your site as oposed to remotely hosted services is that you do not have to show other peoples adverts and you also have totaly control over the look and feel.

[brotherhood of LAN]

The only problem I've heard associated with FDSE is scalability. While 10K documents is good - we would always like something "better" eh? :)

Still though, if its a case of you rearranging the code....im sure it could be tweaked to run it the way you want it to.