Website search

Advice on site search components

[madcat]

Hello Everyone-

I'm sure that there are some hardcore developers running around here that write there own heavy duty search engines (or maybe contract it out?).

I'm looking for a solid search engine for a site that say has 20 pages, or a site that has 300 pages that I can purchase.

What do most people do about search boxes on their site (buy it (where) or right it))...I'm just not looking in the right places for information.

Thanks for any insights,
Madcat

[bill]

You can get the Atomz search on your site up to 500 pages for free. They have great customization options and the results are quite good as well.

[richlowe]

Freefind is a great search engine for web sites.

Richard Lowe

[mack]

I would recomend you take a look at FDSE (fluid dynamics search engine) very easy to install on your server and pretty streight forward to customize to suite the look and feel of your site. The benefits of this over the other services mentioned above is that you host it and do not have any form of forced advertising. Also you can chose when to re-spider your site, when ever your content changes.

[madcat]

Thanks for your replies, I will look at each one.

Fluid Dynamics:

very easy to install on your server

The benefits of this over the other services mentioned above is that you host it

Well, do you mean on my Web hosts server? I don't run my own server yet...It's probably obvious just wanted to clarify.

Madcat

[ergophobe]

Madcat,

check out the automated install. I haven't tried it, but it looks like you just have to give it the domain name, FTP info and stuff like that and it gets installed. I assume you need Perl running or mod_perl or something.

Tom

[mack]

The auto-install works ok.. I used it once

Just take a look on your hosting company website to make sure that are capable of running it...take a look at the fdse system requirements and compare with your host.

Sorry if I was a bit vauge im my other post in this thread.

Hope you get it up and running. :)

[madcat]

Just to get this straight because I can't seem to find the answer I'm looking for. When you design your website that you know is going to have a search utility-

You have to implement the script last thing so it can index your keywords and what not- right. So how do you go about with the placement of the search box. Do you draw it up in the design and implement the script later on?

[Birdman]

<form method="get" action="http://yoursite.com/search/search.pl" />

I did the auto-install also and it went smoothly. Even finds thr path to perl by itself. The form method and action are what call it. I actually had to put it on another site because my host people ignore me when I try to get any CGI stuff on.

[madcat]

They ignore you! That's no good Birdman.

[ppg]

Do you draw it up in the design and implement the script later on?

I just installed fluid dynamics a couple of weeks ago, and thats exactly how I did it, I put in the search box how I wanted it to look and then installed FDSE afterwards. Thankfully FDSE has a very easy to edit template for the search box, so you can make it look any way you want in your page, and have it look teh same when it comes up at the bottom of the search results page that FDSE provides.

Another good point for it is that the bloke who coded it answers technical questions posted at his site very quickly.

[madcat]

Nice! Thanks for that ppg- exactly what I needed to know.