How do I put a search engine onto my web site?

Full text search engine for new web site

• We want our new web site to have a 'search this site' option on the homepage. What third-party solution do you suggest to provide full-text searching? Our site is about 100 pages, all of which is essentially static. Our current search engine is unreliable and requires frequent re-indexing by us. Are there solutions that need no maintenance at our end? Functionality and ease of use are more important than cost. I think we can run PHP and CGI, if that helps.

• Answer:

  Michael2, With large sites, the ability to search within that site is a very important feature. There are several tools available that will index your site and allow you to provide an interface to provide the results to visitors on your site. I have listed several below using different technologies such as PHP and CGI. One of the great things about these technologies is that several developers provide great products with great features at no cost: PHPSiteSearch Language: PHP Requirements: PHP version 4.02 or better Cost: Free Website: http://php.warpedweb.net/sitesearch/ Very nice script that will allow you to index on either meta-tag keywords within the site or the full content of the pages. You can also create exclude files (pages) that you do not want indexed. ZoomSearch Language: PHP or ASP or Javascript Requirements: PHP Cost: Free Website: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom.htm Extremely feature rich script that allows you to create your own results page so you can format the returned results of a search. RiSearch Language: Perl Requirements: Perl 5 Cost: Free Website: http://risearch.org/eng/risearch/index.html Very fast Perl driven search engine mechanism that, according to their site, is designed for large sites (thousands of files) and does not require a database on the back-end. In testing their demo, it worked very quickly I hope that one of the above solutions will meet your needs and allow you to provide a search engine feature on your site. If you need any clarification, please let me know. Regards, -THV Search Strategy: None. Personal knowledge of script repository