PHP search engine script

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PHP search engine script

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womble Posts: 5721 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 13:45:54 Can anyone recommend a php search engine script? (valid, accessible etc.) I've been trying to set a search engine script up on a site without much success so far... 1) Tried Growsearch - utterly lovely, fully accessible etc. etc....but failed to find a number of common words on the site so got binned. 2) Tried FDSE - again utterly lovely and indexed the site now problem, but the search form and results are rather boring. They have detailed instructions on how to integrate it into php pages, and all was going well until half way through the process when I hit a problem with the path to perl (like it can't find it). After checking out their support forum, it seems to be a shared hosting problem, and the recommendation is 'it you want to integrate into php pages, find a php search engine'. So....the search is on. I've been looking at Sphider and Isearch, both of which look like possible contenders. Anyone had any exerience of either of these? _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~


Tailslide Posts: 6366 Joined: 5/10/2005 From: Out here on the raggedy edge Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 13:54:25 I've used sphider. Managed to integrate it ok - hardest thing was getting the cron job working on my server but figured it out eventually after a lot of trial and error - but that's not Sphider's fault. It's the only one I've used so I can't compare it to any others. Search engines seem to come under the title "things that are much harder than you expected". _____________________________ Little Blue Plane Web Design \| Land Rover project (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 5721 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 17:11:00 Just discovering that. I'm giving Sphider a go for now. Installed it fine and it seems to be playing nice, but it's been a b****r to customise to fit in with the rest of the site (being me I had to be clever and not just settle for the header/footer but try and get the sidebars in as well - <hehe> I'll learn one of these days...) - my current effort grades somewhere around "not a hope in hell of validating", being a rather interesting mix of Sphider's table layout, hacked to pieces css from the rest of the site, and bits of php I keep moving about that Sphider's not too impressed with. _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to Tailslide)


jaybee Posts: 14207 Joined: 10/7/2003 From: Berkshire, UK Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 17:17:07 I use Fast Find which is great but it now costs, when I got it it was free. It's SQL based and runs via Cron or its own admin panel. The only thing I would recommend avoiding like the plague is Entropy which you get free on a lot of hosts, it found less than half the content. I'd be interested to know what you come up with as fastfind is restricted to a single domain and I will need another one sooner or later. Hmmm Isearch looks interesting, never come across that approach before. _____________________________ If it ain't broke..... fix it until it is. GAWDS Now where did I put that Doctype? (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 5721 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 17:22:44 Sphider seems pretty good from my limited exploration of it, at least from the search functionality of it. Customising it would probably have been much easier had I just stuck to sticking my header and footer on the search page...feeling masochistic though so I may have another go at using it with the sidebars. Of course I'll share when it's done. _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to jaybee)


jaybee Posts: 14207 Joined: 10/7/2003 From: Berkshire, UK Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 17:26:27 http://www.site-search-pro.com/ These guys are quite good and have a great rating on hotscripts. I've tried their emailer and it''s very good. It's commercial but for a single site only $39 whereas my FastFind kit is $79. _____________________________ If it ain't broke..... fix it until it is. GAWDS Now where did I put that Doctype? (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 5721 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/17/2006 19:38:53 Fickle as I am, Sphider is now dumped. I got fed up of trying to make the search page look anything like the rest of the site. Learnt my lesson with Sphider though and decided to stick with sticking the header and footer on. XHTML Strict valid straight out of the box and seems pretty good. Still some tweaking with the configuration to do, but looking pretty good. _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to jaybee)


Tailslide Posts: 6366 Joined: 5/10/2005 From: Out here on the raggedy edge Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/18/2006 2:57:41 I managed to get sidebars in etc with sphider and get it validating except for the "unfriendly urls" on the page numbers at the bottom. That could be fixed too if I had a little time to spend on it! Which one did you go for in the end - the $39 one? _____________________________ Little Blue Plane Web Design \| Land Rover project (in reply to womble)


womble Posts: 5721 Joined: 3/14/2005 From: Living on the edge Status: offline	RE: PHP search engine script - 6/18/2006 5:11:34 I probably would have done too had I had more patience with it (after a day of creating MySQL databases, forgetting the username and password inbetween creating them and editing the config file, discovering half the nav in includes (unrelated problem) didn't work, and that I had multiple stylesheets that were messing up forms (another unrelated problem), 80°F+ heat and a trip to town in aforementioned heat, I was running low on patience last night). I've gone with iSearch in the end. There's nothing more cheering than seeing that nice little 'valid' green tick as soon as you load the page. As the site's blue anyway and the default colours for the search page and results is blue, I didn't have to edit the css too much, just stuck the header and footer on and tweaked the css a little. I just need to add some iSearch specific comment tags to the nav on the pages to stop the results coming up with things like 63 page results for 'accessibility' etc. because it's picking up all the page links, then reindex, and it's just about done. Now though I have a return trip to town before it gets too hot again to return some of the things bought yesterday and complain about their inaccurate sizing (must be their sizing that's wrong - it's not me that's expanded ). _____________________________ ~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~ ~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~ (in reply to Tailslide)