FrontPage vs. Microsoft Index Server

which is best? does MIS offer site search?

[newnewbie1]

Was wondering...

Has anybody ever used Microsoft Index Server? I hear its a way to search your site on a windows server... Is that right? How does it compare to the FrontPage Search function?

Thanks!

[bmcgee]

I honestly do not know anything about FrontPage search, but my hunch is that it would not be very good. FrontPage in general is very low-quality compare to other similar tools.

However, I do extensively use Index Server. It is a very nice search package, and I'm sure FP cannot match the functionality (based on the price of FP).

Index Server constantly crawls your site when the server load is not heavy. You can literally put a new page on the site and run a query and the results will show up! It allows you to customize the results to show anything you want: page title, ranking score, abstract from the page, date last modified, etc.

Extremely simple to use - it comes with a sample page that you can incorporate into your template and have search running in 5 minutes. And the power of the search is incredible. It has not only wildcard searches, but it even has a grammar engine so "catch**" would return anything with "catch", "caught", etc in it.

If you have IIS, then certainly use Index Server on the server.

[newnewbie1]

Thanks for the feedback bmcgee!

[bmcgee]

If you need a sample script for using Index Server, let me know. I can give you a standalone asp page that will run with no modifications (it just won't look like it belongs to your site without a few tweaks).

Sticky me if you want it.