Integrating site searches

A common query for a lot of websites we build is "can we have a search site function?". As advocates of making the web as usable as possible and subsequently the sites we build as near as damn it to perfect (pending our client's spec's of course ;-)) we're all behind this concept but what if you're simply building a basic website, maybe one without a CMS, or a simple CMS system that doesn't use a database, to index content?

We've built several of these sites as you can well imagine and it's often led to bespoke search apps built or for those less "corporate" minded clients Google's Search API more than suffices but to seemlessly integrate it into your sites costs the client money... Which we all know they don't like to part with - so what are the alternatives?

Paid search solutions are everywhere - just whack "site search" into Google and there are hundreds - for the record we think PicoSearch is one of the better ones - but what about free solutions?

Well on our previous Code Required site we used KSearch which was great but pretty complicated to setup - especially on shared servers when you may not know your perl or site roots without some pretty indepth investigation.

Anyway, before I bore you all to death, we're loving our latest find, it's free, simple to integrate and even comes with a setup installer (which we didn't try ourselves as we went for the more laborious manual approach)... Damn it get on with it... It's called "Perlfect Search" from Perlfect Solutions.

So why do we love it so? Well number one it's free; two: easy to integrate; and three: easy to customise.

The biggest draw for us though was many of these free Perl search scripts scan the WHOLE of your documents so you'll get unrealistic search results. For example, let's say, you have a global navigation included in all your documents with leywords in (not uncommon right?) then this will get indexed.

Perlfect Search is different - by simply adding some basic comment tags aroound blogs of code you want the indexer to ignore you get pretty accurate results to your searches.

For those who, like us, couldn't find these tags or advice on how to implement them simply surround the blocks of code you want Perlfect Search to ignore with:

<!--ignore_perlfect_search-->

and

<!--/ignore_perlfect_search-->

...That's it!

Nice one Perlfect!