Thread

We are an industry non-profit that manages and directs research funded by its members. We are converting our web-site to EE.

The primary benefit to our members is the research reports that result. Currently, this is comprised of a library of about 2000 Word documents and pdfs (full text) most with more than 100 pages in each. I need to be able to do indexed, relative searches through these documents ala Google.

I have looked at using Google CSE but there are no guarantees when my documents would be indexed. I’m trying to avoid an appliance.

Has anyone done this with EE? Has anyone tied one of the search engines available either commercially or as open source?

I know this is pretty vague but I hope the thread can grow all the way to knowI can accomplish my goals with EE.

Thanks!

Mod Edit: Moved to the General Forum for more community visibility.

I don’t have any experience of searching in EE yet, but I do know that an open source PHP search named ‘Sphider’ is fairly good and flexible. With a plugin it can index PDF files, word docs etc.

We’ve been using Google Co-op? with a few of our nonprofit clients. I think it was what came after Google Educational branched merge with something else or the other.  They’ve changed the program name a few times, so its hard to keep up. But it works well. We use it when client don’t like the priority that EE gives in search result—typically by date or by title. When they results that have priorities, we’ll break out the Google Search for them. You can see it in action at Consumer Action. Basically we’ve set-up the Google Search to replace the simple search function. Advanced search is still handled by EE.  The link to the Google site is http://www.google.com/coop/cse/?hl=en

Oops forgot to mention, I believe Google starts the indexing process of the site fairly quickly, but if you are concerned you could probably join Google Co-op with the web developers tool. There you can submit your site for indexing, and get details on when the site was last indexed, as well as how many documents were indexed.