I'm looking for recommendations for a search tool for my website. The website is an online e-book with about 3000 simple html pages. I'd like visitors to be able to search by keywords or using advanced search (ie. boolean, case sensitive). I'd also like to be able to exclude certain pages from the search results. The site is protected so it can't be spidered by regular search engines like Google. I've looked at Site-Search-Pro which seems like it would meet my needs.

I'd welcome any input on Site-Search-Pro or alternatives. Also, curious how difficult/expensive it is to get a programmer to make a custom search tool and if this is worth considering too.

Thanks,

Andrew

It's not a major job to build a site search tool in a server side language and use a database to store document references and keywords.
It's not a trivial task by any means but not hugely complex.

The clever bit is in the retrieval and weighting algorithm.

there are a few off-site site search providers such as;

fusionbot though it gets a bit pricey at the size of your site.
http://www.fusionbot.com/packages.asp

picosearch

Omniture

FreeFind

are some of the better known ones

Thanks for the tips Chris. I'll check out the ones you listed.

Andrew

I've been checking out Wrensoft Zoom as a site search engine. It's a one time fee (instead of monthly), seems very customizable, and has great documentation on its site.

Anybody have any experience with this product?

Andrew

Looked at Wrensoft once for a client who used Actinic shopping cart and wanted to get rid of the FreeFind adverts.

It seemed to work ok for him with weekly updates.

Very good. I think I'm going to plunk down the $99 for Wrensoft Zoom. It looks like it will meet my needs well.

I'll report back.

Andrew

I wanted to add a follow-up note about my experience with Wrensoft Zoom Search. After testing the trial version, I bought and installed the program. The documentation is excellent. Customer support via their online forum was prompt and spot-on every time. With only a couple of hiccups I was able to configure a customized look for my site search including having category-based searching. After having worked with this product for about a month, I have to say I absolutely love it. It's easy to configure and install and the searches are fast and accurate.

Feel free to take a look at how it works on my site: www.icdmeister.com/site/ (this site will be password-protected in the future but is currently unrestricted). If you have Q's, feel free to contact me by PM or to post to this thread.

One disclaimer - my site has relatively static content (it changes only a few times a year) so I'll be indexing manually a few times a year. I haven't used the automatic reindexing options so just can't comment on how well they work.

Regards,

Andrew
(A satisfied customer with no vested interests in this product I'm endorsing).