Site Search

[Jenova]

Hello there,

At the moment i am exploring web development languages and features but one i would very much like to do is a Site Search. Can some one explain to me how they work and how i could go about building one in FrontPage. If possible provide some code on how to do it. If it helps, the most familiar web language to me is Javascript as i am reading a book on it at the moment. Any and all help will be appreciated.

Regards

Jenova

[Merri]

FrontPage + something actually useful = no luck. You'd need some external script to index your pages, for example, a PHP script. A crontab on server (timed tasks) could run this script once a day so it'd keep index up to date; or it could be run manually each time pages have been changed. Also, another PHP script would then use the generated index to return information based on given keywords. Search is something you can't achieve with FrontPage and JavaScript, you'd need a server side script.

I'd just go with Google or some other search engine: there is no need for a custom search system if the site is relatively small (and I assume the site is small as you're using FrontPage). Google or Yahoo will do the search job better, although you can't take full control of the design.

[Jenova]

Thanks for the reply,

I can assure you my site won't be small it's a knowledge base that i am building and what good is a knowledge base if you can't perform a Search? It seemed simpler when i jotted it down on paper. You see, i had this theory.

A user enters search criteria and clicks Search. Then the 'Script' will search the web server or web source for web page names that are similar or the same as the search criteria. If true, a web page will display a list of all pages with the similar or matching names to the search criteria. If false, then the web page displays a message informing the user that there is nothing that matches their criteria.

There must be someway i can include search inside my website in FrontPage. I'm not good with PHP, in fact, i have no experience what so ever. Not only that i do not have a web server, just a general PC. Do you know of any other way or does anyone else know of a different way?

Thanks again for your help merri.

Regards

Jenova

[rory]

Front Page wont do it for you. It is a Design Tool is all, what script support it has is either very little or very useless. I use it myself but only for design and management, and i hard code everything from scratch.

Like Merri said, you will want a server side script, either PHP, ASP, etc ..

Best way would be to use an indexer which indexes the site and puts everything in a database then you search that when you want to. Otherwise searching the site itself can be very slow.

Check out ASPIN.com for free ASP search applications/samples.

Also, you could optionally use google search if you dont want to get into code.

Lastly, check with your hosting company to see what they have to offer, and what they support.

Rory

[Jenova]

Thanks for the reply. So how would i go about using the Google search and would that search my site and not the web or will it do both.

Regards

Jenova

[rory]

never used it but it would index your site and will search that .. it will only index the links it finds though. Cant say if it is free or whether they charge something. Other search engines have this feature as well.

[Merri]

Adding Google is simple, although Google must have indexed the site already or you'll get no results.

	<form action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get"><p>
		<input id="ie" name="ie" type="hidden" value="iso-8859-1">
		<input id="oe" name="oe" type="hidden" value="iso-8859-1">
		<input id="domains" name="domains" type="hidden" value="domain.name;another.domain.name">
		<input id="sitesearch" name="sitesearch" type="hidden" value="domain.name">
		<label for="q">Google-search</label>
		<input id="q" name="q" type="text" value="">
		<input id="btnG" name="btnG" type="submit" value="Find">
	</p></form>

This code is almost directly from one of my sites. Hopefully FrontPage doesn't mess up with the code too much.

sitesearch = the domain name for your site; unfortunatenaly you can't define a path within the domain.

domains = a list of domains you want to give an option to search for. You can leave this empty.

You only need this code, nothing else is required. Although Google also has some kind of tool for providing a little bit more customized search where you can replace Google logo with the logo of your site. I haven't used it in years though so I can't help with that.


Edit!
Also, the best way to get your site indexed is to just have the link available on some other site that has been indexed by Google, after a while Google notices the link and the site gets indexed. I've noticed that if you just go and tell Google the link, you might be waiting for many months until your site gets indexed. My new sites are often indexed within a week and I haven't submitted my sites separately to Google in many years.

[mendhak]

Thanks for the reply,

I can assure you my site won't be small it's a knowledge base that i am building and what good is a knowledge base if you can't perform a Search? It seemed simpler when i jotted it down on paper. You see, i had this theory.

A user enters search criteria and clicks Search. Then the 'Script' will search the web server or web source for web page names that are similar or the same as the search criteria. If true, a web page will display a list of all pages with the similar or matching names to the search criteria. If false, then the web page displays a message informing the user that there is nothing that matches their criteria.

There must be someway i can include search inside my website in FrontPage. I'm not good with PHP, in fact, i have no experience what so ever. Not only that i do not have a web server, just a general PC. Do you know of any other way or does anyone else know of a different way?

Thanks again for your help merri.

Regards

Jenova

If it's a knowledge base, then surely you store your information somewhere... in a database? If it is a database (as it should be) then you should implement your own search engine rather than relying on an external engine for this. It'll only be a matter of querying one single column in a table in your database, that's it!

So my suggestion is you take the time out to learn PHP+MySql and create your search page.