We want our new web site to have a 'search this site' option on the
homepage.  What third-party solution do you suggest to provide
full-text searching?  Our site is about 100 pages, all of which is
essentially static.  Our current search engine is unreliable and
requires frequent re-indexing by us.  Are there solutions that need no
maintenance at our end?  Functionality and ease of use are more
important than cost.  I think we can run PHP and CGI, if that helps.

Michael2,

With large sites, the ability to search within that site is a very
important feature.  There are several tools available that will index
your site and allow you to provide an interface to provide the results
to visitors on your site.  I have listed several below using different
technologies such as PHP and CGI.
One of the great things about these technologies is that several
developers provide great products with great features at no cost:

PHPSiteSearch
Language: PHP
Requirements: PHP version 4.02 or better
Cost: Free
Website: http://php.warpedweb.net/sitesearch/
Very nice script that will allow you to index on either meta-tag
keywords within the site or the full content of the pages.  You can
also create exclude files (pages) that you do not want indexed.

ZoomSearch
Language: PHP or ASP or Javascript
Requirements: PHP 
Cost: Free
Website: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom.htm
Extremely feature rich script that allows you to create your own
results page so you can format the returned results of a search.

RiSearch
Language: Perl
Requirements: Perl 5
Cost: Free
Website: http://risearch.org/eng/risearch/index.html
Very fast Perl driven search engine mechanism that, according to their
site, is designed for large sites (thousands of files) and does not
require a database on the back-end.  In testing their demo, it worked
very quickly

I hope that one of the above solutions will meet your needs and allow
you to provide a search engine feature on your site.  If you need any
clarification, please let me know.

Regards,

-THV

Search Strategy:
None. Personal knowledge of script repository

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Request for Answer Clarification by michael2-ga on 07 Nov 2002 12:28 PST

Do these solutions that no maintenance at our end?  I note that you've
suggested only free options, from personal knowledge.  I'd appreciate
some reearch on fee-based products that might meet our requirements,
as well.

Many thanks

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Request for Answer Clarification by michael2-ga on 07 Nov 2002 12:29 PST

Sorry, for 'that', read 'require'.

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Clarification of Answer by tar_heel_v-ga on 07 Nov 2002 13:16 PST

Michael,

Thanks for your request.  By personal knowledge, I meant I knew of
some locations to find scripts such as the ones I mentioned.  Sorry
for the misunderstanding.

Regarding maintenance on your end, all of the products require that
you index your site when you want to update it.  With the PHP scripts,
you can write a cron job that will call the the indexing executable of
the scrHowever, you said that your site is essentially static,
therefore, after your initial index, you would not require indexing
that often.

Upon further research, I did find a script that I think will meet your
needs:

HomepageSearchEngine
Language: PHP
Requirements:  PHP
Cost: $99/$149
Website: http://www.homepagesearchengine.com/index.phtml
There are two versions, the Plus and the Pro.  Higly configurable
results page.  Includes a cron job that you can schedule to run to
index your page automatically as well as on the fly method.  You have
the have shell access in order to run the cron job. Bear in mind, on
the fly can create speed issues as the script will have to index every
page on your site with each search.  From looking at the site and the
demo, this appears to be the best option for your needs.

Thanks again for your question and please let me know if I can be of
any further assistance.

Regards,

-THV

Very useful.  Thanks very much

THV comments are spot on but tend to focus on ISPs that allow Perl or
PHP scripting.  ISPs that run on Microsoft boxes - relatively few -
can also use Index Server via IDC/HTX files - old I know but it works.
 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnindex/html/msdn_istips.asp

There are better ways but if your ISP offers frontpage extensions only
then you should be covered.

Good luck!
Franticorang