What Alter­na­tives are Avail­able to Search Engine Scripts?

You have prob­a­bly found your­self, at one time or another, try­ing to locate infor­ma­tion on a web­site using the website’s inter­nal search engine. You prob­a­bly found it much eas­ier to locate the infor­ma­tion you were look­ing for too. In order to locate such infor­ma­tion, a search engine script must first be installed onto the site. There are many search engine scripts on the web writ­ten using the dif­fer­ent web pro­gram­ming lan­guages avail­able. Most of them how­ever are writ­ten in Perl, ASP or CGI. Let us take a closer look at some of the scripts com­monly used on most sites.

A com­mon lan­guage used on the web is PHP. PHP scripts run on web servers and can be placed on sites to allow vis­i­tors to search for spe­cific pages or doc­u­ments on a site. A PHP search engine script typ­i­cally work by crawl­ing a web­site, index­ing it and stor­ing what­ever infor­ma­tion it finds on a data­base. When a vis­i­tor searches the site, the search engine merely con­sults its index and dis­plays its results. One PHP search engine script that is com­monly used is called Sphider. This script uses the MySQL to store indexed infor­ma­tion. It can han­dle dynamic and sta­tic pages and can fol­low links to your web page while per­form­ing full text index­ing. It is even able to index PDF and DOC files while exclud­ing com­mon phrases like AND, OR and offers sug­ges­tions for mistyped queries. Another PHP search engine script, TSEP sup­ports wild­card searches and can be used to define words that will not be indexed on the site pages.

An alter­na­tive to PHP scripts is Perl search engine CGI scripts. A Perl search engine script may work by either crawl­ing a site at the time a search request is made or it may require index­ing the site prior to using it. In order to use Perl Scripts, you must have CGI access to your web server. One Perl script com­monly used is the Fluid Dynam­ics search engine script. It offers a rich set of search queries includ­ing phrase search­ing, case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches among oth­ers. For sites with over 1000 pages, the Perl­fect CGI search engine script can be used to get fast search results. Oth­ers scripts include Ksearch, JASearch, Fluffy CGI script, HTgrep, Site Search among others.

Clearly, with so many alter­na­tives to choose from, there is lit­tle rea­son for a web­site not to have a search engine script installed.