Finding the Right Search Engine
By Steven Champeon
You have a problem. Your users can't find anything on your Web site or intranet. They can find what's on the home page, but the home page changes every day. Behind it, your site has more than thirty thousand pages, hosted on fifty servers. What to do?
The time, energy, and money you've spent building your site is of no benefit if your users can't find what they're looking for. One way to start seeing a return on your investment is to install a search engine. But which one? And how do search engines work, anyway?
Kicking the Tires
A variety of off-the-shelf search engine packages are available to developers. Some are commercial, while others are freely available open-source software. My favorite is a versatile, open-source package called ht://dig (www.htdig.org). If you aren't interested in configuring and maintaining your own search engine, you can partner with a full-service search provider (see "
Search Engines for Hire" for some options).
But what should you consider when choosing a search engine solution? Start by asking a few questions.
First of all, what content needs to be indexed? Sites commonly encompass many kinds of content: plain text, HTML pages, Word documents, Adobe PDF files, and so forth. You may also need support for SGML entities and extended character sets, like Unicode, if some of your content is in non-English languages.<>
