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kwilliams
194 Posts |
 Posted - 2003-10-15 : 10:06:05
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| Hello,I work for a local government, so you could only imagine how much money we don't have in our budget. But I've been looking at getting a search engine for our site from a company, such as Google, Verity, or Atomz. But as I'm sure you already know, they are each quite expensive. So I looked at the idea of creating our own search engine. I found a quick article on "Building a Web Spider" at http://www.asp101.com/articles/chris/spider/default.asp, but it seemed like it would take some time to complete.I looked on DMXZone.com for any DW extensions for search engines in ASP, but couldn't find any. So I'm hoping that someone in this forum can let me know about any DW search engine extensions, cheap but good-working search engine applications, freeware, "how to build a search engine" tutorials, etc.Any & all help is appreciated. Thanks.P.S. I use ASP w/JavaScript on my pages, with a SQL Server 2k back-end DB.KWilliams |
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mohdowais
Sheikh of Yak Knowledge
1456 Posts |
Posted - 2003-10-15 : 10:41:16
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What's a DW extension? What do you want to search for, web pages or text inside the database? I imagine you are talking about searching the website, but there are some things to look out for. Particularly the fact that if most of your content comes from the database, there is very little point in searching the ASP pages as they are. Do you have a lot of static content on your website (as opposed to database-drawn)? You might want to investigate using MS Index Server. I haven't yet got to use it in production, but it's been quite promising in development tests.Owais
Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot |
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kwilliams
194 Posts |
Posted - 2003-10-15 : 10:48:15
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| Ho Owais,Thanks again for the quick response. Our site is mostly static, but contains some dynamic content. I think the best bet for our organization would be to have a web-bot search our site, store the info in a DB table, and then search pages would pull that data when requested by the user. I would perform the web-bot daily. The second half of this plan doesn't seem to difficult, as it's how we are currently set up. But creating a web-bot to search our site looks like it's a lot more complicated.A DW Extension is an application developed by users of Dreamweaver. Some of them are free, and others cost some $$. I've heard about the MS Index Server at a recent conference, but they seemed to say that it pulls up too much info. I will look into it though. Thanks.KWilliams |
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Merkin
Funky Drop Bear Fearing SQL Dude!
4970 Posts |
Posted - 2003-10-15 : 11:12:45
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| Forget about DW extensions, they won't help you here.Index server will index static documents, and you can merge that with the results of a database search. Index server takes a bit of playing with to get the hang of, but it will do what you want. You have a lot of options to filter your results.Or, you can pursue the route you are thinking, having a separate process index your site.I have had some luck with this product http://www.innerprise.net/es-bi.asp which will index all your web as well as PDFs and DOC files into SQL Server, where it uses Full Text indexing to catalog and search. It also comes with a set of ASP scripts which form the search engine interface. These look a whole lot like a well known search engine that starts with the letter G.It's not free, but the price is reasonable for what it does. However, if you find a decent python, C#, VB.NET, Java or Perl programmer you could probably write the spider yourself.There are some other interesting free packages (you'll have to Google, I can't recall the names) that work well, most actually implement their own web server to return the results. This may or may not meet your requirements, but it's another idea.Hope that gives you some ideas.Damian |
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uberman
Posting Yak Master
159 Posts |
Posted - 2003-10-15 : 12:12:19
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| We use dtsearch, small, effective, fast.Give it a try http://www.dtsearch.com, they allow you to download eval versionsTheir support, when I have had to use it, is also effective... |
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kwilliams
194 Posts |
Posted - 2003-10-15 : 12:25:29
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| Hi uberman,Thanks for the reference to dtsearch. Maybe you could help me out with a couple of questions about the product, and how it's performed for you:1) How easy was it to implement for you, and how long did it take?2) How does it work with dynamic pages and databases?3) How customizable is the product to the current look of my site?Thanks.KWilliams |
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Building vs. Buying Search Engine for Site