Your Own Search Engine with SWISH
A Custom Search Facility For Your Web Site
By Adriaan Van Roeden
Most visitors to your Web site aren't willing to spend much time figuring out the structure of your site to get to the information they want. Of course, it helps to devote thought to the presentation and structure of the information so that your site is more accessible to visitors. But for quick results, nothing beats a good search engine. n In a recent consulting project, I was asked to create just such a search facility. Because my client's site was served by the Apache server, which doesn't include a built-in search engine, I decided to use SWISH (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans), an easy-to-use indexing and search tool written by Kevin Hughes of EIT (developers of Commercenet and secure HTTP). This article describes my experiences with SWISH and shows how to implement your own search engine.
Why a Search Engine?
The ever-growing popularity of search engines like AltaVista, Lycos, and Opentex—twhich seem to have indexed every Web page in existence—only proves that more and more Web users don't want to visit site after site to find what they're looking for. Instead, surfers typically begin with one of the popular search engines and spend most of their online session following the links it presents. So what's the point of providing a search facility on your server if the "big guys" already do it for free?
The first reason is that your site will not get indexed precisely when you want, so recently added information may be unavailable or the links may be outdated.
