php search engines

Which do you use?

[taiwanho]

I am looking for a good, easy to install and maintain search engine for the sites I build. Open source or commercial.

There is a good list in an old post here [webmasterworld.com], but mostly focussing on the free. Does anyone have any updates or new favs?

A big problem is that I need it to be able to search trad Chinese pages. I really really don't want to have to spend the time building my own. Is Google the only option?

[bill]

Google does such a good job with Chinese that I've switched some of my sites over to it. You now have the option of paying and removing most of the Google footprint.

The problem you'll find here at WebmasterWorld is that most suggestions for site search engines don't take into account Chinese, Japanese or Korean encodings. Even the engines you can find that do support CJK don't have very attractive or relevant SERPs. Google is tough to beat these days.

[taiwanho]

thanks for the reply bill. i'll have a look at google again.

i did get a reply from Site Search Pro saying their software can handle multiple languages, including big5. but that's the only other option i have found so far.

[edited by: jatar_k at 1:17 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]

[jecasc]

I have heard that Lucene is good. However never tried it myself.

[eelixduppy]

You will have some luck with the opensource repositories around the web. A good place to start, other than google, of course, if hotscripts.com, sourceforge.net, freshmeat.net, phpclasses.org. They will definitely have something that suits your needs.

[bill]

I truly had a difficult time going through a lot of the script repositories trying to find a site SE that could handle Chinese. I was looking at engines that could handle GB2312 at the time. I looked at a number of the popular ones but wasn't very happy with the output. YMMV

[taiwanho]

I have been through a lot of the os options but also not really found anything that works well.

i'll have a look at Lucene though, thanks for the tip.