CodeCanyon – PHP Search Engine

Features include:

* Easy to install and configure
* Searches all pages on your website (even search multiple websites!)
* Super fast searching!
* No database required – even easier to install!
* Finds matching file names (eg: searching for ‘report’ will find a file called ‘latest report .doc‘)
* Finds matches in HTML META tags
* Finds matches in url’s (eg: searching for ‘products’ will find a file called ‘/website/my- products .html‘)
* It will even search INSIDE PDF DOCUMENTS!
* The results are sorted by relevance in a page-by-page view similar to Google.
* The text that displays under each search result is trimmed to a certain length so it fits on the page nicely.
* Any matching keywords in the results are highlighted so the user can see why that result was returned.
* Advanced users:
A custom callback function is included so you can insert your own results in with normal HTML results (eg: by querying a database of products for a match). This makes for great search integration between different products on an existing website.

Note: pdf document support is only available on Linux hosting accounts that have “pdftotext” installed. Please contact your hosting provider to check if pdftotext is installed.
Configuration:

You can control the following options:

* Which website addresses (URL’s) to search
* Which file names to ignore and never display in search results
* How many results to display on each page
* Plus many more advanced settings in the config.php file
* There is an easy to use admin page which helps you configure these.

Advantages

The advantages of something like this over a google integrated solution

* You can style it the way you want
* Instant search results (no waiting weeks for Google to index your new website)
* Customers don’t bug you that the search isn’t picking up the latest results
* Control over exactly when the indexer will scrape your updated website content again
* It can index “every” page of your website, something that Google may not do or take a long time to do
* Custom callback function so advanced users can integrate a mysql query and inject custom results into the list
* No advertising (customers don’t like ads on their professional looking websites)
* It has an awesome highlighting feature

Requirements

* PHP5
* Linux hosting account (have not tested on Windows but it should work)
* “pdftotext” utility installed if you wish to search PDF files (contact your hosting provider to see if it is installed)
* Know how to upload files to your website (eg: with FTP )
* Know some basic HTML /CSS so you can style the search results page (to suit your look & feel) if the defaults do not work.

How to install:

1. Unzip the file from CodeCanyon
2. Upload search.php to your website (eg: yourwebsite.com/search.php)
3. Upload phpsearch_files/ folder to your website (eg: yourwebsite.com/phpsearch_files/)
4. Visit the administration page by going to yourwebsite.com/phpsearch_files/admin.php
5. Set “write” permissions via FTP remote view on the phpsearch_files/search_cache/ folder (contact me if you get stuck doing this)
6. Create a form on your website like this:

7. Done
(replace yourwebsite.com with your actual website address above)

How to style the search results page:

1. Open the phpsearch_files/header.php file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor (eg: Dreamweaver)
2. Delete any default HTML content from this file.
3. Copy & Paste any HTML code you would like to display above the search results into this file.
4. Open the phpsearch_files/footer.php file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor (eg: Dreamweaver)
5. Delete any default HTML content from this file.
6. Copy & Paste any HTML code you would like to display below the search results into this file.
7. Advanced users: you can do PHP includes eg: into these two files.
8. Advanced users: you can also from one of your existing files to display results there.
9. You can edit the CSS in phpsearch_files/phpsearch.css to match the colours to your website design if the defaults do not work.
10. Done.