internal site search engine

any good "boxed" php scripts out there?

[louponne]

I need to install an internal se on a site. I have an "old" perl script that works pretty well, but it works off of a flat file and this site is too big for that. What's more, I'm *much* more comfortable with php than with perl. There must be fully developped scripts to do this, but I can't find any via google, etc that "look" professional.

I'd like:
- separate indexing script (I mean the indexing takes place in one step, storing the results in, say a mysql db, and the searching takes place off that db) [added] hm - I think that this should work off a mysql db, but maybe flat files would be sufficient? The site's nearing 200 pages or so[/added]
- results ordered by relevance, depending where words found
- highlighting matched words
- support for pdf
- "no index" word skip list
- "no index" page skip list
- "no index" tags for skipping parts of pages

Anyone use anything in this area?

[jatar_k]

hard to say louponne, I have used a few custom search scripts in the past but I haven't used an out of the box solution.

I also haven't had sites where I was really worried about the site search too much.

any have any ideas or have you maybe found something louponne?

[louponne]

Thanks for responding, jatar_k - my post was really beginning to feel very lonely!

Mind you, I'm not looking necessarily for a complete out-of-the-box solution, but at least one I can work from. The only thing I could find that seemed to come relatively close is Zoom by wrensoft.com - the only main thing it doesn't do is stock the data in a mysql db (it works off of flat files). The rest looks pretty good.

I'm actually quite surprised not to find more scripts for this. I guess everyone does their own!

[jatar_k]

seems to be that way. It always depneds on the site. A lot of sites I've worked with don't even have a search.

It's a bit strange because it seems to be something people ask for a lot. I guess that's because there a re no good ones.

[ProfMoriarty]

Try PHPDig ([phpdig.toiletoine.net ]), it´s GPL and nice clean code you can change easily to match your needs.

Best regards,

ProfMoriarty

[louponne]

Thanks, ProfMoriarty - I had found that one, but it seemed to be missing so many of the features I need that it didn't seem worthwhile. But I've downloaded it and I'll give it a better look!

[ProfMoriarty]

louponne,

give it a try. So did I and after having invested some time, it was worth the effort because PHPDig´s rudiments are quite good and really easily to modify.

First take a look at the basic tables created in your database. That should make you an easy start and the search algorithm is yet rather clear.

So you need to understand how indexing works. It´s not as complicated as one may think as long you have the table structure and its meaning in mind - and now the (okay, _your_) work begins. Make some use of regular expressions to locate words, skip passages etc. Use a wrapper or whatever to read and parse PDFs - anyway, these are the main lines of code you have to extend.

Good luck,

ProfMoriarty