Forums / Cotonti / Development / Search on this site

I'm not surprised Google comes up with better results. They have spent millions tweaking their crawlers and search engine. Find is a 2 month project and intended to provide an alternative to the old search plugin, using a more efficient searching method for large sites (index-based vs full-text). The index-based method seems not to work so well, especially with cyrillic languages. Probably it can be improved a lot but I doubt its worth the effort (using Sphider would be a better choice in this case).

I'd be fine with using either Google search or Sphinx on Cotonti. Google would be the easy choice, but creating a Sphinx module for Cotonti will allow large sites to have a reliable and free search engine without the Google branding. Sites not on a VPS are probably small enough to use the search plugin.

Here's our options:

• Google Custom Search: Good results; not customizable (Google branding)
• Sphinx: Good results; customizable; requires VPS / dedicated hosting
• Sphider: Probably pretty good results; customizable; works on shared hosting; project is no longer maintained.
• Find: Poor results; very customizable; tight integration with Cotonti; works on shared hosting.

My initial idea was to modify Find so it uses Sphider. That should improve its search results a lot. Downside is that Sphider is no longer maintained so we're on our own on that. I think this is the best option for medium-sized websites running on shared hosting. For Cotonti.com Sphinx is probably the best option, as we'd like to be able to customize the results (both visually and functionally, e.g. search in specific site area).