[WEB4LIB] search engines- free or cheap

[A. Bullen]

Karen,

Swish-E is a wonderful tool. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It 
takes some patience to get tweaked exactly the way you want it to be 
tweaked, but once it's in place, it is perfect. The software, etc. can 
be found at http://www.swish-e.org/. Combine this search engine with the 
spidering capabilites of wget 
(http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html) and you can do pretty much 
anything you want.

I've also had good luck with ht://dig (http://www.htdig.org/); it is, 
however, tricky to install correctly. It is also not as flexible or as 
powerful as Swish-E.

Andrew Bullen
Illinois State Library

Karen Davis wrote:

>We are currently using Picosearch for our library web site, but are wonering if there are other low cost or free alternatives we should be looking at. 
>
>Picosearch is costing us 250 per year and is easy to use, but who knows, there might be something even better our there. Recommendations/ suggestions (with short descriptions) would be very much appreciated. 
>
>
>--
>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>Karen Davis, Coordinator
>Center for Community Networking & 
>Web Administrator
>Lawrence Public Library
>707 Vermont Street
>Lawrence, KS 66044
>785.843.3833 ext. 104
>
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>
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