search box - searching non database content

Hello...

I have been asked to do some coding for a friend. She has created her own website and would like to allow users to search it for specific content..

Is it possible to search a site as opposed to a database? I know how to do this with a database...but at present the site is simply HTML pages...

She would like a search area/button for users to type in a topic or phase and the results are displayed on the page with links to that particular page/area
of the site.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help,

Nicky

What you're talking about adding to her site is a website search engine. There are a lot of open source scripts to choose from. My personal favorite is sphider (http://www.cs.ioc.ee/~ando/sphider/), which is very easy to setup and use.

Thank you. I think this sounds like what I need to do I just didn't think of it!

So this is a Google search box but one that only searches your website..

Will have a look. Thanks again

So this is a Google search box but one that only searches your website..No, not the one I mentioned. Google has a website search engine that is very much like sphider, if you want to go that route. It's also pretty easy to setup, from what I've seen. The only problem with theirs is that it will only show you results that Google has indexed. With an open source search engine like sphider, you have control over what is indexed and thus, what search results are shown to your visitors. The only downside is that you have to make sure you index new content as you add it to your site. Whichever of these you choose all depends on how much effort you want to put into it.