This is a continuation of In-site Search Options and Comparison (Part I)
Option C: Build Your Own Custom Search Solution
You can write code to index all content to your database and build your own search feature.
Pros: You have complete control of not only the look and feel of the search results page, but also how the search is conducted. If you would like to promote certain pages on the results page, you can program the search to give these pages a higher rank.
Cons: Relatively high development cost. Depending on how sophisticated you would like your search to be, the development effort can be high. A few things you might want to consider:
- Using full text search so your search can go beyond a simple string match
- Putting effort to make sure the PDFs and Word docs are searchable
- Automating the process further so that a script periodically indexes the site without human intervention.
Option D: Google Mini
Within this four-item list, Google is mentioned for the second time. But this is all about search, which is almost a synonym for Google’s business.
Google Mini is a piece of hardware with software embedded. You purchase the hardware and host it somewhere with a good internet connection, usually in a data center. Then you configure Google Mini to index your website and also integrate the Google Mini search to your website. The search experience will then be very similar to how search is done at Google.com.
Google Mini is suitable for indexing good-sized websites or websites with multiple subsites.
Pros: Google Mini works with over 220 different file formats and can be integrated with existing security systems.
Cons: Relatively higher cost. The most affordable version of Google Mini costs approximately $2000 a year. It can search up to 50,000 documents. There is additional cost associated with hosting the Google Mini hardware at a data center.
To learn more about Google Mini, visit: