Building a search engine

Help Meeeee......!

[ncsuk]

Im trying to build a search engine for the sake of learning and jumping in at the deep end...! Does anyone know anywhere that I can get some help of some description be it scripts or some free technical expertise.

I dont even know what im doing with it yet although ive designed the site and I think its pretty cool :)

Any help would be appreciated.

[jimbeetle]

Do I read it right that you have the site design but no search engine or spider?

If so, there are plenty of free and almost-free scripts that should get you started, just search for 'search engine script'.

The WW site search [webmasterworld.com] is fdse from xav.com and is pretty much completely customizable. There are quite a few others out there and chances are you can find one that will fit your needs or that you can fiddle around to do what you want.

Jim

[sugarkane]

There's some interesting stuff in this old thread [webmasterworld.com] if you're into hand-rolling a solution rather than using an existing script.

I also enjoyed a book called "Finding Out About..." by Richard K. Belew - at least, I enjoyed the earlier parts that dealt with general search theory, before it got heavily into the maths and lost me completely ;)

[brotherhood of LAN]

Searching for 'information retrieval keyword' gets good results....just replace "keyword" with a more related term to what you need to do.

I'm reading through this one just now.
www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~iain/keith/

There's quite a bit of info on other pages on the same server.

Looking at the thread sugarkane gave you'll find tons of info in Brett's posts too ;)

[ncsuk]

Ahh well if we can share some info that would be a good thing :)

[brotherhood of LAN]

How many pages do you plan to store?

Anything under 10000 and the free scripts can do it. If It's over 10K I'd look to pay money or make it yourself....

It would be good to know what you've done and plan to do since it's quite a large topic area ;) I think quite a few people here toy with the idea of making a search engine.