I suspect people commonly underestimate what’s required of a good Web site search engine. Some developers probably think that you just create a search box and then use the supplied terms in a database query to get the results. But there are actually three aspects to a search engine:
- The index of the content to be searched
- The act of actually performing the search
- The reporting of the search results
Many people, I believe, only really think about these last two, but it’s really the index that’s key to the success of any search engine, just like a good index at the back of a book makes it possible for a reader to quickly find what they’re looking for.
As far as search engines go, the gold standard is Apache Lucene. Lucene has been a reliable and popular search engine of choice for years now. Although Lucene is written in Java, the Zend_Search_Lucene module, part of the Zend Framework, is a great PHP port of the software. [intlink id=”790″ type=”post”]In a previous post[/intlink], I explained how to integrate Zend_Search_Lucene into a Yii-based Web application. The focus in that post is really on getting the two different frameworks to work together. This is easily accomplished for two reasons:
- Yii supports third-party tools nicely
- The Zend Framework can be used piecemeal
So that previous post on Yii and Zend_Search_Lucene walks you through the Yii Controller and View files you’d create to perform a search and report upon the results, something that Zend_Search_Lucene does easily. Creating the index itself is the actual challenge, then, and one that I don’t feel is adequately documented elsewhere. In this post, I explain how to use Zend_Search_Lucene to create a search index of a site.
