search engines

P

porcelina

hey all,

im not sure where to post this but if somone could point me in the right
direction it would be greatly appreciated. basically, i feel competent
enough with html and graphic design but i want to start making more
'functional' websites. for example, could someone point me in the direction
where i can learn how to make basic seach functions on websites. im familiar
with fields and such in excel but have no experience in writing code where
users can search by field and or range(S). are there programs that can do
this for you? what language do i need to learn? sorry for any ignorance or
if this is the wrong group to ask

porcelina
 
C

Cameron

porcelina said:
hey all,

im not sure where to post this but if somone could point me in the right
direction it would be greatly appreciated. basically, i feel competent
enough with html and graphic design but i want to start making more
'functional' websites. for example, could someone point me in the direction
where i can learn how to make basic seach functions on websites. im familiar
with fields and such in excel but have no experience in writing code where
users can search by field and or range(S). are there programs that can do
this for you? what language do i need to learn? sorry for any ignorance or
if this is the wrong group to ask

porcelina

Well, it depends to what extent you want to search the website, there
are many ways you could go about it with regards to matching pages,
personally I would use the PHP server side scripting language, but this
is not something you can learn to do effectively over night, I believe,
and I hesitate to say this, the frontpage extensions provide some kind
of website search functionality, but I never use them so can't provide
any information on them really. Meta tags are the age old method of
providing a description of pages and keywords, so you could create a
script if you were to learn a language to get these tags and match them
against what the user specifies in the search field, or indeed you could
search the entire page, you can make the search as thorough or as simple
as you like, but the more complex the search the harder it will be to do.

~Cameron
 
B

brucie

i feel competent enough with html and graphic design but i want to
start making more 'functional' websites.

the first step would be improving your html/css design skills. adding a
search capability isn't going to improve sites functionality if its
already broken.
for example, could someone point me in the direction where i can learn
how to make basic seach functions on websites.

whats your favorite server side language?
are there programs that can do this for you?

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Search_Engines/
http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/Searching/
http://www.hotscripts.com/ASP/Scripts_and_Components/Searching/
 
G

George Self

porcelina said:
hey all,

im not sure where to post this but if somone could point me in the right
direction it would be greatly appreciated. basically, i feel competent
enough with html and graphic design but i want to start making more
'functional' websites. for example, could someone point me in the
direction where i can learn how to make basic seach functions on websites.
im familiar with fields and such in excel but have no experience in
writing code where users can search by field and or range(S). are there
programs that can do this for you? what language do i need to learn? sorry
for any ignorance or if this is the wrong group to ask

porcelina

You may want to investigate the power of Google for this type of function.
It's possible to create a Google search that is restricted to only a single
domain. Armed with that possibility, you could create a search form that
will accept certain values from your user (like the search phrase), append
the "magic phrase" to restrict the search to the domain of interest, and
send it to Google as an action ("http://www.google.com/search"). You would
then get a standard Google search results page back.

Of course, since this is a Goolge feature, your results page will have their
stanard advertising boxes - but that may be a small price to pay for the
power of Google in an easy-to-create form. You can find a wonderful example
of this type of interface at http://www.faganfinder.com/engines
google.shtml. The author has included a pile of JavaScript to do some
prelimiary checking of the data entered (for example, searching by date
requires coverting dates to julian). This page, though, permits you to
search only a specific domain, among other things.

For the more adventurous, there is a Google API (Applications Programming
Interface) so you could write your own PHP, C#, PERL, or whatever code and
hook directly into Google's search engine.

All of this information comes from the O'Reilly book "Google Hacks" by
Calishain and Dornfest (ISBN: 0596004478). The book has examples of code
you can use to create your own Google interface. (By the way, this is not a
paid advertisment. I'm not one of the authors nor do I get any sort of
"kickback" (I wish I did). I just like the book and think it would help you
in creating a site-level search page.)

Good luck in your project.

--George
 

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