Search Engine for a Dynamic Site

[mdr227]

Does anyone have good recommendations for a search engine tool to use on a dynamic web site?

 

[damber]

What do you want to search ?



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[mdr227]

I am trying to find a way to setup a search engine for a dynamic site I have.

 

[Creto]

I think damber was meaning just what in particular you want to search, like a database or what?

 

[damber]

...mmmm....

yes, but what do you want to search on this 'dynamic site' ?

Is the site database driven ? If so, what db ?
Is it XML driven ?
What data elements would you want people to be able to search upon ?
What kind of information does your site provide/store ?
What pages are currently available that the search results could link to ?
Do you want to build your own ASP search function, or do you want a 3rd party tool ?
If you want a 3rd party tool, how much are you willing to pay ?

Essentially, 'dynamic' infers that you store data somewhere and get/present it based on input values to a query. With this in mind, you would need to consider the above to determine how to search that data store - is it a single table/field or is it a range of data in disparate tables ?

If your data doesn't change too often then why not build an index page that links to all the possibilities (dynamically of course), and just 'site google' it once it has been indexed?

I may be wrong, but I don't think that there are many tools (if any) that search unknown databases/datasources directly and create a results page that links to a meaningful page - not without a fair bit of development/configuration and innevitably cost.

If you want real power then Google do an out of the box hardware solution which is pretty powerful and you can set it to index your dynamic site every day (public google doesn't do this because of the miriad websites on the net). This would still need you to have a link to the content you want to search on as part of your navigation.

Again, this may not be right if you want instantanseous and up to date results - for this it is probably best if you build your own search function.



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[mdr227]

Yes, all of the html in the pages is pulled from a database table. What I want is if a user wants to do a search for a particular keyword such as "Schedule" then the search engine will go through the site and find all of the pages that would be generated that include the word Schedule.

 

[damber]

If you're using MS SQL Server and have Full-Text-Indexing turned on for the relevant table/field, then use the CONTAINS() T-SQL Clause of the SELECT statement

here is a link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_tsqlcon_6lyk.asp

This is the best direct T-SQL method that I am aware of, but has several pre-requisites that may mean it's not right for you.

Or if you want a more simplified approach use the LIKE Clause of the SELECT Statement

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_tsqlcon_6lyk.asp

Then it is just a simple select statement from the table that holds the HTML returning a list of probable matches. When the user clicks on the link in the results set you can respond with the content field of that row.

There are many other things that can be done in terms of weighting and scoring and even indexing, but start simple so that you get the basics working first.

Hope that helps.

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