Search Engine Scripts

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#1 Wed, 07/12/2006 - 09:45
ADobkin

Search Engine Scripts

One of my clients wants to add search engine support to their web site, in order for visitors to their site to be able to search their content. At first glance, I don't see any support for this in the current list of script installers. Can anyone recommend a good script for this?

I know this can be easily done through a third-party, such as Google, but I think they'd prefer to keep it internal to their site.

Thanks, Alan

Wed, 07/12/2006 - 15:31
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey Alan,

Search is a surprisingly ornery topic. It's far more complicated than it should be...

The best search tools I know of aren't merely scripts. They are written in C or C++, and must be built for the platform in use (I'm thinking here of htdig and swish++, which are both quite good, but not easily configured for virtual hosting use). Often they're quite complicated to build and configure.

If you've got some specific scripts in mind, that are simple to install and small, it wouldn't be too difficult to get one or two such scripts supported. A quick google doesn't turn up anything...but I know there must be something out there that fits the description.

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Thu, 07/13/2006 - 04:55
ChrisBlackwell

I don't use PHP (i use Coldfusion which is bundled with Verity search engine) but a quick google gave me this..
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.html
Not sure if thats compatible with PHP installed by VM, but it looks good.

Cheers, Chris

Thu, 07/13/2006 - 07:44
ADobkin

Thanks for your responses, Joe and Chris. I had a feeling there wasn't going to be a simple solution to this request.

ht://Dig was one of the programs I had thought of, as I had used it briefly in the past in notice it is still included with Red Hat distributions. I searched their mailing list, and it does seem possible to configure for virtual hosting:

http://www.htdig.org/mail/2000/02/0141.html

I'm not sure how well this works though, but it sounds like a possibility. I also just took a look at Swish-e (looks similar to Swish++), and it appears to be configurable for virtual hosting too:

http://swish-e.org/archive/2005-04/9339.html

The Zend option looks interesting, but the phrase "it can add search capabilities to almost any PHP-driven website" makes me think that it won't work with a regular HTML (non-PHP) web site. For now, I am looking for a more basic search engine that will just index static web content.

Let me know if this is really a lot more complex than it looks, but otherwise I think adding search features to Virtualmin will be a big plus. It could be a nice selling point, especially if other vendors are not offering an integrated solution for this.

Thanks,
Alan

Tue, 10/24/2006 - 05:44
ADobkin

To add another one to the list,[A HRef="http://www.mnoGoSearch.org/">mnoGoSearch</A> appears to be a good option. It is free for Unix servers, and it supports virtual server domains out of the box.

The sourceware.org mailing lists (including Cygwin and a bunch of GNU projects) had been using htdig for several years, and they just switched to mnoGoSearch in January 2006.

Would this be a viable candidate for inclusion into Virtualmin?

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