search functionality for site

[gonky]

Hello,
I'm having to delve into the murky world of site wide searches. My 'backend' knowledge is pretty poor, what
I need the user to be able to search by price, location, number of widjets etc. Is this possible if the site does not use a database.

could somebody point me in the right direction

cheers

[rogerdp]

You can always search without a database by "generating" the database for each search (spidering your own site on each search). That's only viable if you have a lot more processor time than disk space, and usually not viable at all.

You can use a Google site search, if you don't mind waiting for Google to update its index (every month or so).

I haven't yet seen a site-search program I'd reccommend installing, but I really haven't looked either.

[lorax]

I've used PHPDig and have had very good luck with it. It crawls your site and creates an index of it. You can edit the index to delete out pages you don't want. Optionally you can tell it what directories or files you don't want to index in the first place. Quick and fully customizable.

[tedster]

search by price, location, number of widjets etc. Is this possible if the site does not use a database.

From what I know, if you want to offer such highly focused search areas, then you will need a database. Spidered pages won't break down like that.