I am looking at putting on an own site search engine to my site. I am fed up with putting Google on as all it does is direct people away from the site a lot of the time and it is also too dependent on indexed pages. Has anybody any opinions on a good on-site search. I would prefer one I can buy the script (not pay a monthly fee) but I am open to suggestions as the script ones may not be as good. I would love the search engine to read the forms on the site. I sell kilts etc and I will be using Roman cart which places an html form at the bottom of the page for choices and Add to cart. I would like when the customer searched for say "Cameron" for it to show all pages that it is mentioned on so basically showing all the products that are available in that tartan. Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.
I've used perlfect on a site before: http://www.perlfect.com/freescripts/search/ and it works well, it seems fast and rather accurate. The only thing is you have to reindex when you add new content or the search won't get it (which is rather obvious)... Also I haven't tried to see if it will search the forums (I specifically exclude it from doing so to keep the index smaller), but as long as the forums are seo friendly I don't see any reason it wouldn't try to. Also it seems to be rather stable seeing that It's never caused any problems and has a nicely customizeable template...
thanks for the advice. the only thing that is a wee bit confusing is that I woould like it to be able to search "forms" not "forums" Do you know if it does this?
What type of documents are the forms? I know it does search pdf's with an addon. It also searches numerous types of other documents.
The HTML would be like this: <table><tr><td nowrap><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size="+0"> <table width="737" border="1" align="center" bordercolor="#6666CC"> <tr> <td width="211" height="116" rowspan="2"><div align="center"><img src="quaich.gif" width="200" height="93"></div></td> <td width="549" align="left" valign="top"><p class="style1"><U><strong>The Plain Collection Quaichs </strong></U>- These quaichs range in sizes from a keyring to 10" <A href="Quaich/Plain-Quaichs.htm">More...</A><br> <br> <br> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top"><form action=http://www.romancart.com/cart.asp method=post> <div align="right"> <input type=hidden name=price value=0> <input type=hidden name=storeid value=xxxx> <input type=hidden name=quantity value=1> <p align="left"> Tartan Scarves - T7 quality </p> <p align="left">Select Tartan: <select name=itemname2> <option value="please choose tartan">please choose tartan… </option> <option value="Allison Mod">Allison Mod </option> <option value="Anderson Mod ">Anderson Mod </option> <option value="Angus Mod ">Angus Mod </option> <option value="Armstrong Mod ">Armstrong Mod </option> <option value="Armstrong O C ">Armstrong O C </option> <option value="Baird Mod ">Baird Mod </option> <option value="Baird O C ">Baird O C </option> <option value="Barclay Htg Mod ">Barclay Htg Mod </option> <option value="Barclay Dress Mod ">Barclay Dress Mod </option> Will it read the text between the <option> tags?
I've used htdig before, and it was pretty easy to get going. I've heard good things about PhpDig, but I haven't tried it myself. It would probably be even easier since it's MySQL and PHP, and I'd probably try that one first the next time I needed something like this.
Yes somebody else has mentioned phpdig to me and I have already pput a question on their forum about the above code in my last post. I will post back here with their answer so that if you need it for another site you will know what they say.
Back to my early days on the Internet, there was a hosting service offerring htdig as part of their preinstalled scripts (freedom2suff) remarking that such script was used by Microsoft and other major Search Engines by then. We are talking about 6-7 years ago so this is just a reference.