I got this email today at work from a developer’s listserv that I’m on.
Our Web site is in the process of being redesigned. The developer working on this project has asked me to find code for a free site-search form in PHP.
I’ve been searching without having much luck. Anyone have a suggestion?
I replied
We’re using Zend PHP framework for our Staff Directory and we use its included search function called Zend_Search_Lucene but have been looking at ht://Dig and Google to do most of our heavy lifting for our administrative sites.
There isn’t really, that I know of, a PHP search Fn as a core feature in PHP. Rather many different brewed engines that do search. If you’ll look at frameworks they tend to have these classes available but for your site I recommend suing ht://Dig or use Google’s search feature on your site.
To find out more on the Google search for your site specifically you can visit http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
If you want to simply search your site for information then I say use what others have spent millions of dollars on research and testing to find out. From a developer stand point I would not want to recreate or develop a search algorithm when there are businesses out there that that is all they do.
Google has an excellent API which allows one to have Google’s search on their site and for most clients that will work. However, if you have an application that requires searching on a more detailed level then, of course, a custom approach is suitable but more times than not clients want something that is custom and will actually pay more for a feature that someone else has already built.
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