[WEB4LIB] Search functions

[Avi Rappoport]

The main considerations I've found in site search are future growth 
in both site size and search traffic, server OS and internal 
resources for configuration maintenance.

Of the services I like Atomz, it is very fast and doesn't require 
anyone to know Unix, but the costs increase dramatically after 500 
pages.  Likewise MondoSearch is not cheap, but neither of them have 
ads on the site.  PicoSearch, FreeFind, FusionBot, S.L.I. and 
Webinator are good alternative services.

If you have a Windows server, it's pretty easy to install dtSearch, 
Alkaline, Copernic, or Phantom (which also runs on Mac OS 8 & 9). 
All of these are good solid programs with decent documentation and 
admin interfaces.

Unix is a bit harder, they seem to be less interested in making 
things usable 'for the rest of us'.  There's a very nice search 
engine that's free and open-source, SWISH-E, designed for metadata 
and somewhat oriented towards library use.  A bunch of the others, 
such as ASPSeek, mnoGoSearch, ht://Dig are good but you need to know 
about compilers and make systems.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly, 
also take a look at my site <http://www.searchtools.com>.

Avi

At 12:40 PM -0800 3/20/02, Nancy  Eaton wrote:
>We are interested in having a search-this-site function on our site. 
>Our ISP can do this for us - for a price, of course. I know that 
>there are some other alternatives out there - picosearch and atomz 
>are the ones that I've seen recently. I'm interested in opinions 
>about which direction we should go: hire this out locally, or go 
>with either a paid or a free service from the Internet. The site is 
>currently about 400 pages. This is also being considered for the 
>City's web site (the library is a City department), and I need to 
>present some information about alternatives to the City web 
>committee next week. Thanks for your help.


-- 
Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
    <http://www.searchtools.com>