Perlfect Search

It just occurred to me that I didn't acknowledge someone that I think I should. So here I am to set that right.

When I developed my recent sites I realised that since they have well over 100 pages of detailed content each, I needed to provide a site search facility for visitors. The hunt was on.

There is no shortage of search engines.

There are simple little ones that don't spider the content. They expect the installer to provide a long list of searchable (or more correctly, findable) terms, complete with the page reference details. Imagine what a huge pain-in-the-neck that would be for a sizable site. Actually, come to think of it, for any sized site.

The next step up adds limited assistance. They actually extract key terms from the keyword and sometimes description tags of the pages. That's definitely a big improvement, but in reasonably complex, genuinely content-rich pages, there is no way the meta tags can ever contain all the words and terms of value to a searcher. So they are quite inadequate too.

Some are available that will spider the whole site and index the words found. These are great. Very helpful indeed. In this group there remains considerable diversity however. More sifting required.

Some are quite rigid in their presentation of search results. You can have the results any way you like, so long as it's their way!

Some are ridiculously expensive. They sometimes offer a free version but restrict usage to sites of less than a limited number of pages, such as 50 or 100. Not much use if you happen to have a few pages over the limit. Unless you pay of course but the prices seem too high for sites that offer information for free.

The big players haven't neglected this market either. They all want some of the action. So Google, Yahoo!, FreeSearch and others offer their services too. But they introduce more issues and simply muddy the water.

For instance, Google may let you use their excellent search technology for site-search functionality, but they only respider the site when they are good and ready, not as often as one might like or need. The other big players all suffer from this problem. Some will make this problem go away - you guessed it - for a price.

Anyway, not to unduely waffle on too much (remember I'm actually a woffler) I found the perfect solution. Actually, the Perlfect solution. Perlfect search offers a totally free search engine written in the robust and proven PERL.

It's powerful. It spiders everything and does it on your command, so there's no need to wait. It is super flexible and the results can be completely customised to fit in with the look and feel of your site design. There are many setup options to wring heaps of power and functionality from the application or it can be used pretty much as is with excellent results. It even generates XHTML W3C valid pages!

I could go on and on about it here but here's a better idea. Go and see for yourself. You can go and put it through its paces on my site or go and get more info from the developers at Perlfectsearch.

And did I mention, it's free? Yep, seriously. It is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. Outstanding!