website search

[infiniphunk]

Hi guys, I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction...
I have the task ahead of me of setting up a search engine that can be used by the employees of our company to search the content of our site.
The site is sort of medium-sized, but it's getting to the point I need to add something to it so that our users can find info on it.
any suggestions are welcome.
thanks

[deathadder]

Hey,

Could you give us any more info about your companys site? I would guess the content is grabbed from a DB of some sort?

If you haven't got the time / resources to knock something together inhouse, a quick Google brought back these:

http://www.sphider.eu/
http://risearch.org/eng/risearch_php/index.html

[ph34r]

You can create a custom google search box that defines searching only in your domain...

Of course, that means that google has to spider your domain...

[deathadder]

I was under the impression that it was a intranet site...if not the custom Google search would probably be the easiest :D

[infiniphunk]

You're absolutely right, it's strictly intranet; it would be impossible for Google to spider it, so a Google search engine is out of the question.
The server itself runs on ubuntu (but we're soon changing it to Debian stable)
and it's a simple site with just content, all done in html and php. There is no db functionality at this time, I haven't implemented mysql to do anything ... yet.
I've just started looking at this (http://www.isearchthenet.com/isearch/) ... can any of you make a recomendation?

[JohnT]

Grep for Windows comes to my mind....HERE (http://www.google.com/webhp?tab=mw#hl=en&source=hp&fkt=23766&fsdt=31859&q=windows+grep+equivalent&aq=1&aqi=g10&oq=windows+grep&fp=a6b12fe4bce92d85)

[infiniphunk]

JohnT, you always tell me to do things the hard way! :P

[ph34r]

OK, if it is plain text stuff (html, php, txt, etc) then SimpleSearch may do it for you. Intensive, 'cause it basically runs a recursive grep, but it works.

You could also write your own - I did one years ago for the archive of an email listserv I created, worked well.

[JohnT]

JohnT, you always tell me to do things the hard way! :P
I reverse engineer everything:D

[infiniphunk]

rats!@

just tried Simple search and after setting it up i get:

error 405 :(

"Method Not Allowed
The requested method POST is not allowed for the URL /search/search.pl."

this I am just testing on my server at home which is openbsd ... I wonder if it's this confounded chrooted apache business. or something else I have to change in /var/www/conf/httpd.conf ?

[JohnT]

This should keep you busy for awhile:D
http://www.searchtools.com/

If not here are several thousand to choose from....have fun.
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=search+intranet

[infiniphunk]

yeah I checked out that site before already and it kinda scared the **** outta me.
Anyway I think I'm going to keep trying a bit more with SimpleSearch, hopefully getting it going on debian will be easier.
Thanks for the suggestion :)

[infiniphunk]

ok so I've set up SimpleSearch now on Debian (Lenny) and I'm finding I still have the same problem. I've changed search.html so that
<form method="POST" action="search.pl">


because the search.pl file is in the same directory as the search.html file.

I've edited search.ph so that the define variables are like so:

$basedir = '/var/www/sites/mysite/';
$baseurl = 'http://www.mysite.com/';
@files = ('*.html');
$title = "Matt's Script Archive";
$title_url = 'http://www.mysite.com/';
$search_url = 'http://www.mysite.com/search/search.html';


problem now is if I go to do a search with it, rather than running the search.pl script, the firefox download dialogue box opens asking me if I want to run search.pl with Geany or do I want to save it.

Help???

[deathadder]

Hi infiniphunk

I'd expect to see the form defined similar to this:
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/search.pl">

I'd suggest on reading how to enable CGI on Apache, a couple of links that might shed some light for you:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=422412
http://bignosebird.com/apache/a3.shtml
http://nixcraft.com/linux-software/306-debian-apache2-cgi-bin-location.html

[infiniphunk]

thanks a lot, going to try it!

[infiniphunk]

THANK YOU!
I now have this sort of working, the script runs and returns search results. However, clicking any of the search results is giving me a

"The requested URL /my_site/stuff/emailts/index.php was not found on this server. "

hmmm. needs more work :P

[infiniphunk]

it all works fine now :)
Just had to tweak search.pl a bit more and now it works flawlessly.
The only thing I've noted though is it does the job for sites that are just .html files, but as soon as you point the script at directories that have .php files...well, things start behaving a little strangely. No problem, this is awesome for now and works 100% perfectly well for my needs.
this ticket can be closed. (nvmnd that's right I'm not at work right now lol)

[deathadder]

this ticket can be closed.
I'm starting to really hate that group of words, I've seen that too many times in the last few weeks with bug reports!

Glad it's working though. :)