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What Alternatives are Available to Search Engine Scripts?

You have probably found yourself, at one time or another, trying to locate information on a website using the website’s internal search engine. You probably found it much easier to locate the information you were looking for too. In order to locate such information, a search engine script must first be installed onto the site. There are many search engine scripts on the web written using the different web programming languages available. Most of them however are written in Perl, ASP or CGI. Let us take a closer look at some of the scripts commonly used on most sites.

A common language used on the web is PHP. PHP scripts run on web servers and can be placed on sites to allow visitors to search for specific pages or documents on a site. A PHP search engine script typically work by crawling a website, indexing it and storing whatever information it finds on a database. When a visitor searches the site, the search engine merely consults its index and displays its results. One PHP search engine script that is commonly used is called Sphider. This script uses the MySQL to store indexed information. It can handle dynamic and static pages and can follow links to your web page while performing full text indexing. It is even able to index PDF and DOC files while excluding common phrases like AND, OR and offers suggestions for mistyped queries. Another PHP search engine script, TSEP supports wildcard searches and can be used to define words that will not be indexed on the site pages.

An alternative to PHP scripts is Perl search engine CGI scripts. A Perl search engine script may work by either crawling a site at the time a search request is made or it may require indexing the site prior to using it. In order to use Perl Scripts, you must have CGI access to your web server. One Perl script commonly used is the Fluid Dynamics search engine script. It offers a rich set of search queries including phrase searching, case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches among others. For sites with over 1000 pages, the Perlfect CGI search engine script can be used to get fast search results. Others scripts include Ksearch, JASearch, Fluffy CGI script, HTgrep, Site Search among others.

Clearly, with so many alternatives to choose from, there is little reason for a website not to have a search engine script installed.

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