Develop a search engine as powerful as Google , and its free!

In the Internet age, people want information packaged like fast food: served instantly, hassle-free, and in bite-size (or is that byte-size?) morsels. Indeed, to feed the impatient and hungry masses, even the most modest Web site is now expected to serve a diverse menu of fast-fact formats:

• RSS is your pizza guy, bringing fresh-baked data right to your door.
• The weblog is your local Chinese take-out, delivering your favorite spicy dish.
• The forum is the neighborhood potluck (or perhaps more aptly, the food fight scene in "Animal House").
• And search is like all-you-can-eat night at your local cafeteriaplex: Just fill up your plate with anything your heart desires, time and again, so long as your gullet — and your chair — hold up.

Luckily, PHP developers can find a wide variety of RSS, blog, and forum software to create or amend a site. And while Google and others are virtually omniscient and do funnel traffic, the search engines aren't necessarily well suited to every site.
For example, if your Web site offers hundreds of thousands of new and refurbished Porsche parts, Google may turn up your site for a broad search such as "Carrera parts," but it may not yield an accurate result for the more specific "used 1991 Porsche 911 Targa headlight bezel" inquiry.
If your content is highly specialized or your visitors expect your search feature to parallel real-world workflow, it's best to augment the Web's global search engines with a local search system tailored to your site. (See "A needle in a billion haystacks" for more instances of specialized search.)
Discover how to add a fast, capable, open source, and free search engine to a PHP site. Little of the visible Web site is developed here. Instead, the focus is on the components required to deliver effective search results: the database, the index, the search engine, and the PHP application program interface (API).