This search tool is perfect if you want a quick an easy way to search your dynamic websites. Simply upload the search.php file and make a form on your website like below and youre done! It couldnt be easier!
- Update: 6 March 2010 support for larger websites. Please re-download this file if you have purchased it prior to this date.
- Update: 8 March 2010 I have created an additional online demo tool which will allow you to test this on your website before buying. Click here to try the php search engine on your website
<form action="search.php" method="GET"><input type="text" name="search"> <input type="submit" name="go" value="Search Website"></form>
Features include:
- Easy to install and configure
- Searches all pages on your website (even search multiple websites!)
- Super fast searching!
- No database required even easier to install!
- Finds matching file names (eg: searching for report will find a file called latest report .doc)
- Finds matches in HTML META tags
- Finds matches in urls (eg: searching for products will find a file called /website/my- products .html)
- It will even search INSIDE PDF DOCUMENTS!
- The results are sorted by relevance in a page-by-page view similar to Google.
- The text that displays under each search result is trimmed to a certain length so it fits on the page nicely.
- Any matching keywords in the results are highlighted so the user can see why that result was returned.
- Advanced users:
A custom callback function is included so you can insert your own results in with normal HTML results (eg: by querying a database of products for a match). This makes for great search integration between different products on an existing website.
Note: pdf document support is only available on Linux hosting accounts that have pdftotext installed. Please contact your hosting provider to check if pdftotext is installed.
Configuration:
You can control the following options:
- Which website addresses (URLs) to search
- Which file names to ignore and never display in search results
- How many results to display on each page
- Plus many more advanced settings in the config.php file
- There is an easy to use admin page which helps you configure these.
Advantages
The advantages of something like this over a google integrated solution
- You can style it the way you want
- Instant search results (no waiting weeks for Google to index your new website)
- Customers dont bug you that the search isnt picking up the latest results
- Control over exactly when the indexer will scrape your updated website content again
- It can index every page of your website, something that Google may not do or take a long time to do
- Custom callback function so advanced users can integrate a mysql query and inject custom results into the list
- No advertising (customers dont like ads on their professional looking websites)
- It has an awesome highlighting feature
Requirements
- PHP5
- Linux hosting account (have not tested on Windows but it should work)
- cURL enabled on your hosting account
- a hosting account that allows cURL loop back connections to the same server (ask your hosting provider)
- pdftotext utility installed if you wish to search PDF files (contact your hosting provider to see if it is installed)
- Know how to upload files to your website (eg: with FTP )
- Know some basic HTML /CSS so you can style the search results page (to suit your look & feel) if the defaults do not work.
How to install:
- Unzip the file from CodeCanyon
- Upload search.php to your website (eg: yourwebsite.com/search.php)
- Upload phpsearch_files/ folder to your website (eg: yourwebsite.com/phpsearch_files/)
- Visit the administration page by going to yourwebsite.com/phpsearch_files/admin.php
- Set write permissions via FTP remote view on the phpsearch_files/search_cache/ folder (contact me if you get stuck doing this)
- Create a form on your website like this:
<form action="search.php" method="GET"><input type="text" name="search"> <input type="submit" name="go" value="Search Website"></form>
- Done
(replace yourwebsite.com with your actual website address above)
How to style the search results page:
- Open the phpsearch_files/header.php file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor (eg: Dreamweaver)
- Delete any default HTML content from this file.
- Copy & Paste any HTML code you would like to display above the search results into this file.
- Open the phpsearch_files/footer.php file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor (eg: Dreamweaver)
- Delete any default HTML content from this file.
- Copy & Paste any HTML code you would like to display below the search results into this file.
- Advanced users: you can do PHP includes eg: <?php include(your_header_file.php);?> into these two files.
- Advanced users: you can also <?php include(search.php);?> from one of your existing files to display results there.
- You can edit the CSS in phpsearch_files/phpsearch.css to match the colours to your website design if the defaults do not work.
- Done.