search engine

[Crake]

how do i add a search engine to my site?

[chilipie]

Bit of a vague question really. Have you got any more detail?

[chump2877]

I use a php script that opens up and goes through each of my files and directories looking for the search string...it only finds exact matches, but this way you don't need to index all of the text on your site in a relational database (like the big search engines do it - Yahoo, for instance)....

If you know some php, I can post a barebones script to get you started....

R.J.

[Crake]

ye! plz :thumbsup:

[chump2877]

See attached.

[musher]

Hey chump2877, does your script search inside PDFs, or word docs, etc ?

[chump2877]

I doubt it would find anything inside a .pdf because the text is embedded in the file in a compressed format...As for MS Word documents, how would your visitor even access the search results unless he/she could open up a word document in a browser?...As far as I know, this is not possible....

Generally, I think you'd be better off just to use the script to search standard web pages...But you're welcome to try and see if it will search other files... ;)

[JamieR]

The best search engine that I know of apart from a custom written one is Fluid Dynamics Search Engine - available from www.xav.com. It is shareware but you can use the Trial version (its unlimited btw). That is pretty good and is written in CGI (Perl) and not PHP. It also has a very easy to use Admin section. :D

[musher]

chump2877
As for MS Word documents, how would your visitor even access the search results unless he/she could open up a word document in a browser?...As far as I know, this is not possible....

Yep open word documents in a browser all the time (on our Intranet), we have alot of MS Word Documents that our users access, I set it up so they wouldn't have to brows thru the network to find them. I currently have all the document titles & URLs in an SQL DB and they can search thru that (my first dynamic page :D ).
But one of the things on my ToDo list (very low pri) is to see if I can find a search eng that will search inside PDFs & Docs.

[chump2877]

well I've tested the php code with text files, and the script can open up those and search them.....so why not MS word docs as well....

Give it a try, but don't take my word for it....and if you don't want to go through the trouble of setting up the script and testing it, I'm sure someone else on here knows for certain if php filesystem and string matching functions will work with word docs...

Good luck :)

[Crake]

i have done it!