[Web4lib] web site search engines

[Andrew Darby]

Well, after the good folks at campus IT switched to Google (without 
letting us know), I spent too much time trying to find a search engine 
which made sense in our environment (no root access to campus server, 
content distributed between the campus server and a paid ISP).  I came 
across one which I quite like, indeed, feel evangelical about:  the 
Fluid Dynamics Search Engine.

http://www.xav.com/scripts/search/
http://www.xav.com/scripts/search/features.html

It's very easy to install, easy to customize headers/footers and 
results, and allows good control of what you index.  (Basically, it 
spiders through your site, asking you to tick the boxes for any links 
you want to further spider and add to the index.  You can manually 
add/delete items or folders you want spidered.  Takes a little while to 
set up, but it's fun.  Tick boxes!)  It indexes the whole document, but 
you can fiddle with the weighting of the various meta tags (if you 
reliably use them).  It doesn't index database contents, although I've 
set ours to index the "show all" pages of database results, which 
amounts to the same thing.  I'd never heard of it before, and we're not 
exactly a huge site, but I like it.  As for price, it's shareware; he 
allows you to try it for as long as you like with no conditions, but if 
you like it, the righteous thing to do is send him the 40 bucks.

You're welcome to try our search (which I have stripped down to the basics):

http://www.ithaca.edu/library/search/index.php

Andrew Darby
Web Services Librarian
Ithaca College Library
http://www.ithaca.edu/library/

Mark Costa wrote:
> I am looking for a good web site search engine that I can place on our
> library's web site. It needs to be free, easy to implement, and not be
> Google.
>  It's not that I have a beef with Google, its just that they refuse to fix
> their statistics reporting program.
>  TIYA
>  mc
> 
> --
> Mark R. Costa
> Off-Campus Librarian, Eastern Region
> Central Michigan University
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