Free Site Search Engines

Fluid Dynamics Search Engine

This is a Perl based search engine that builds either a flat-file text database or a MySQL database (at your option) at indexing time. When your visitor enters a search term, it will only search that database. It is template based, so you can customise its appearance with the look and feel of your site. Among the search engine scripts that I have evaluated, this probably offers the richest set of search queries possible, handling not only Boolean searches, but case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches, phrase searching, search for specific attributes (eg words in the body, title, keywords, etc), and so on. The author notes that since it is rich in features, it is likely to be a bit more server-intensive than other search engines which has less features. Note that it seems that you can either use the free version (which appears to have some limitations and obliges you to display the link to their site) or pay for the shareware version.

Perlfect CGI Search Engine Script

Perlfect Search is a Perl based search engine script designed for those with large sites. It's supposed to be able to handle even sites with 1000+ pages in a reasonable time. It is able to use any DBM compatible module found on the system, such as SDBM, NDBM, etc. The program is released under the GNU General Public Licence and is "sophisticated, powerful, versatile, customizable" and is loaded with features. If you have a huge site, you might need this to get fast search results. Like other search engine scripts designed for large sites, you have to run an indexer (or spider) separately on your site to update the search engine database.

KSearch

This is a Perl search engine script which you can install on your web server to provide your visitors with a means to search your website for the documents they need. Features of this engine include the ability to search for multiple terms and phrases, boolean searches, a configurable list of terms and files/directories to ignore, configurable number of results per page, ability to search within results, ability to sort results by matches, score, date, time, etc, ability to highlight the terms in results, ability to index PDF files, etc.

KSearch Client Side

Need to put a search engine on a floppy disk or CDROM distribution of your site? This script allows you to do just that. It does not need a web server, is compatible with Netscape and Internet Explorer, handles boolean queries, etc.

Fluffy CGI Search Engine Script

This Perl search engine CGI script highlights the relevant words in the search engine results that is displayed when your visitor does a search. It also allows you to mark areas on your web pages that are to be excluded from the search engine, configure the ranking criteria, etc. There is a script to index (spider) your site, and one that is run from your web page for your visitors to search your site.

JASearch

A Perl script that searches the documents on your site. It allows the Boolean AND and OR in your search strings.

Hukilau Search Engine

This Perl script can only be used for non-commercial purposes. You must also display the name "Hukilau Search Engine" on all pages returned by the script.

Site Search

A search engine CGI script that searches the documents on your site for keywords. You can request that your search string be matched exactly or as a pattern.

Simple Search

This Perl script is from Matt Wright's archive. It does a search of all documents on your site when the user requests for a search (ie, it does not pre-index your site). The engine supports Boolean expressions in your search string.

Htgrep

This powerful search engine script allows you to use either Boolean or regular expressions in your queries. However, you need to supply a search file, which will be used by the script to locate the appropriate documents.

URL Search Engine

This search engine scans a text database for the search expression and displays all the URLs that match. Unlike engines that search the HTML documents themselves, you need to set up a text file containing the various keywords and their respective URLs before using the search engine.