Our site www.LearnOutLoud.com is wanting to greatly improve it's
internal search capability.  Currently we have a very crude customized
search that we haven't really worked on at all.  We don't have a lot
of money (no $100,000 enterprise search tool for us), but we need good
internal search of our site if we ever want to keep anyone there.

Anyway I've done a lot of research (reading every article off
Searchtools.com) but I'm still wondering what would the best solution
for our us.  We want some customization (keeping the advanced search,
filter results, sort by, results per page, and image thumbnails in the
results of our current search), but we also want some basic quality
search features such as Boolean, spell-checking, stemming, alternate
tenses, some synonym-handling, meta analysis, and other basics.  Right
now we're testing the free Pico Search on our main search on the
testing site and we're thinking that we'll need to customize the
advanced search. But I'm don't know yet about Pico Search.  We're also
looking at open source search applications and we want them to be
Linux based so we don't have to handle search on a separate server. 
Do you have any suggestions about what's the best way to go with good,
cheap, quality internal search these days?  If we choose your way
we'll give you the answer.

---

Request for Question Clarification by sgtcory-ga on 02 Mar 2005 16:53 PST

Hello jpbischke,

I was wondering if you could take a look at one of my previous answers
and see if it fits in your situation :

Search Engine Question
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=444963

I can be more specific about your needs if this route looks good. 

Thank you-
SgtCory

Your running PHP which integrates w/(My)SQL great.  Why not just pull
together your own SQL search engine?  its not that hard to migrate
your data to SQL if you havent already and then pull results from the
SQL server.  PHP is designed to ease the integration between websites
and databases... exactly what you are trying to do.

you can also check out:

http://tsep.sourceforge.net/