I often get asked for search functionality for web applications. Normally, this is a nice easy issue to confront, if all your data is stored in a 'content' table, but let's say we have custom modules outside of our CMS and those areas will need to be search as well. What about documents?
Depending on your search needs the solution can be quite complicated and extensive.
There are some great solutions on the web, and one of the best (free) is Java Lucene. Google makes a search appliance, but comes with a cost. With this sponsored post, I wanted to discus Minalyzer Lite Site Search , which is a command line wrapper on top of Java's Lucene.
The concept is simple, but incredibly powerful. You would use Minalyzer to spider and index your entire web site. You could also reference files on the file system by direct index. When queries are issued against Minalyzer, a XML result is returned that can be parsed and displayed on your site. If spidering isn't a attractive option to gather information on your database driven web site, you can connect to the database directly.
Being able to index your entire site is a powerful feature, and comes at a great cost. Currently, they are offering free downloads! By the second quarter of 2007, it will be available for purchase, so this is a great time to get in this action.
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