Site Search Feature

how to build a site search

[BoogieDown]

Hello you website genius, and might I add goodlookin' too!

I am looking to build a “site search feature” like the one featured on webmasterworld.com. You know the search feature that allows you to search the content of the site you are on?

I was curious if there are some easy steps that I can take in order to build this? And possibly some code to help?

Thanks,

--boogiedown

[The Contractor]

Why re-invent the wheel? Why not put Google's free search on your site or purchase a search script that will index your site and it's pages? I know of a really good one that has a nice admin panel, search stats, algo tweaking etc for $39 (FM SiteSearch)- why spend more than 10 minutes building one from scratch at that cost?

I'm sure if you look around you will find many that are very low cost.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I am looking to build a “site search feature” like the one featured on webmasterworld.com.

You mean the one that doesn't work :)

[bill]

> You mean the one that doesn't work

This one works:
Additional Search Tools for WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Thanks Bill, I just installed it. Great!

[mack]

You might want to have a look at FDSE (fluid Dynamics search engine)

It instals on your server and offers a pretty good search interface.

Mack.

[BoogieDown]

Thanks for all your help; I have looked into them and they are exactly what I was asking for.

--New idea to ponder--

I want to start a search engine specific to a certain topic (lets call it widget). My idea is to build a program that will search the WWW (Google, Yahoo etc.) and compile a list of websites that are specific to "widget", pulling not only the URL from that site, but also the metas from the sites as well. (That way I could use the metas to build my own search engine)

This way I could compile my own search data base for "widget" but monitor it so that it is really specific to "widget".

I have this idea because it seems that even when I use Google or Yahoo to do a specific search for my topic, that the same old sites come up and not really the sites that I am looking for.

So do you guys have any idea on if this is possible and if so where should I start looking for it?

[bill]

GigaBlast has recently been promoting a service that might work along the lines you're thinking: GigaBlast Custom Topic Search [gigablast.com]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I want to start a search engine specific to a certain topic (lets call it widget). My idea is to build a program that will search the WWW (Google, Yahoo etc.) and compile a list of websites that are specific to "widget", pulling not only the URL from that site, but also the metas from the sites as well. (That way I could use the metas to build my own search engine)

The name for this is scraping :(