Site Search with HTDIG (
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Want to add a search engine to your Web site but don't know how? Well, today's your lucky day! In this tutorial, find out how to obtain, install and use the popular ht://Dig indexing engine to add powerful, effective search capabilities to your site with minimal time and fuss.
Today, when you think about looking for something on the Web, there's only one search engine you turn to - Google. With its speed, unique indexing technology and huge database of Web pages, Google has rapidly become the best search engine on the Web, with results that are frighteningly accurate and search algorithms that are optimized for the hyperlinked, diversified information structure of the Web.
However, this isn't an article about Google - more than enough has already been written about it, by people far more experienced and knowledgeable than yours truly. Rather, this is about something related - setting up a search engine for your own Web site, so that users can locate what they're looking for quickly and efficiently. If you've ever attempted this exercise, you know that it can take anywhere between a few hours to a couple of weeks, depending on the requirements and the amount of precision needed.
There are many ways to index the content of your site. You could store the content in a database, index it and use SQL queries to look for records matching the search string. You could scan the site content to build word frequency tables, and use those tables to locate matching pages. You could use a natural-language or fuzzy search engine to create an index for your site and return results scored by relevance. Or you could save yourself a lot of development time and effort, and just install ht://Dig
What is ht://Dig? Good question. Come on in and find out.
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