Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm about to launch a new site soon for a client that sells a variety of widgets created by 15 different manufucturers. Each Manufucturer will have their own page, each page may contain 5-200 widgets for sale, with specific widget names available. The site is in html, its not php-driven.
What's a good search engine feature that I can add to the site for free or at a low cost? Google will need months to index the site, so a google search bar is out of the question (and a bit unprofessional for an e-commerce site, I would think). So if a visitor is looking for a special widget on the products page, what type of search form can I add to the site to get him/her to the exact page that carries what they need since the keywords appear on that page?
It's free, and has an unlimited indexing size. You'll need shell access to use it though, or an understanding and helpful tech-support at your web host.
F
The company that hosts my site has hit-and-miss support reps. About 80% of the time I get guys with canned answers who don't understand what I'm tryint to do, but every once in a while I luck out and get someone familiar with what I'm trying to accomplish.
I'll look into this more and see if it will work.
Alternative to the one mentioned above is Perlfect Search.
Perlfect Search is a sophisticated, powerful, versatile, customizable and effective site indexing/searching suite available under an open source license (GPL). It comes as a pair of distinct scripts. The indexer, that automatically scans and indexes a web site, and the search engine, a cgi script that serves search queries for keywords over the index, and displays results pages in html, in a standard format including title, description and relevance ranking for each matching document. Advanced features include stopwords, a potent exclude mechanism and a handy automatic installation and configuration utility.
