I have a reasonable good search script that performs AND, OR and quoted string searches and ranks the results. This is a live search on the data in a MySQL database not an indexed search. This has worked quite well for me in the past, and I’m sure it will continue to work and get better as I refine the script.
But I was looking through a bunch of search engines seeing how other people did things to try and get some pointers on a better system of ranking search results than I was currently using. And what should I stumble across; Sphider.
Sphider is a PHP search engine that indexes a site and then runs the search queries over the index. It’s a little different than what I usually do, but I thought I’d take a look at it anyway. And I was quite pleasantly surprised.
It installed really easily and was no trouble to set up. After a quick read of the online docs (which are a bit sparse in places), I was able to get it to spider the site and index the content. The search results were relevant and the ranking quite good. It supports robots.txt files, meta tags, and you can tell it not to index parts of a page, like navigation menus and such.
I ended up spending quite bit of time just playing around, indexing and re-indexing the site I was working on with different settings to see what effect the changes had.
The conclusion I came to was that this is actually quite cool. It seems to do a good job of indexing, it’s easy to use, and it gives relevant results. Unfortunately the specs of the project I’m working have since changed, making it mandatory to have a live search of the database, so I won’t be using it this time. But I will be keeping it in the wings ready and waiting for any site that needs a good search engine.
Check it out yourself and see how good it is on your projects.
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