.NET search functions

need to get a good searching component for site

[TinkyWinky]

Okay I wonder if anyone can help on this one?

We run SQL and a .NET site for which we have about 20,000 pages of content.

We are having problems trying to operate a search that is accurate when it comes to finding certain combinations of information.

For example:

Searching for "Dermalogica skin care" on Google et al brings back ... pages of content with Dermalogica products on.

Ours brings back pages that include Back care (Care), tanning products (skin is included in the part of copy) etc. i.e. it using all the words but not attributing relevancy factors to each one.

It does bring back one page with Dermalogica on, but that's it. This is the only page that specifically talks about Dermalogica. We can't seeme to get it to act upon relevancy of "skin care" as higher than individual components.

All the pages are had written so there is no need to worry about spam in this case.

Is there some useful .NET shareware or even software that can be bought to tackle this problem. It is really lettign down the site and I need to find a cure asap.

We have tried using SQL's own built in search 'algo', but that's pretty pony to be honest.

Any ideas anyone?

[Ocean10000]

I am assuming you are using MS FreeText based search in SQL, and the content is stored in the sql server. You might be able to add weight to the terms to get your desired results. This is an article on MSDN which covers the sql code to do this. Searching for Words or Phrases Using Weighted Values (Weighted Term) [msdn2.microsoft.com]

You may wish to look at other solutions for your free text search processor. Another possible solution would be
DotLucene [dotlucene.net] which is open-source search engine for .NET writen in C# which you can customize to your needs.

[duckhunter]

Yes, if returning the most relevant results first when searching through a ton of text was simple we'd all have our own search engines.

I had the same problem and now use the Google API. They are ALOT better at it than I am ;)

[TinkyWinky]

LOL - thanks Duck hunter... too true.

Just wondered if there was a Nutch-like equivalent out there - happy to pay for use etc... there's only about 25,000 descriptions and content pages for the search tool to work with.