Spider is a free PHP & MySQL backend search engine & spider. I felt that I had to write a review about it, since it is a great search engine that is very similar to Google in ways.

Sphider's homepage is located here: http://cs.ioc.ee/~ando/sphider/

My high school's website is getting a makeover for when we move into the new building that is currently under construction. Google's a great search engine but it grabs pages from other pages in the district and that isn't cool. Plus, it can take 3 hours for any template changes to take effect in our custom search page. Not cool.

So we're planning on a custom search engine and Sphider seems promising to our needs. The admin area has the ability to launch the spider and you can pause indexing too... just close the page showing you what has been indexed!

Spider has been approved by me and is really handy tool! Just be careful of what you index. It is PERFECT for sites ranging in 100-2000 pages. It can do roughly 1000 pages per hour and my school's site is a few thousand. Most of our site is images and so sphider doesn't index images so it saves time. But since the spider doesn't index fast (~1 second per page), it is not suggested for sites over 2000 pages or you could just let it index overnight possibly.

It's free and open source so you can tinker with it.

Other than the indexing spider being really slow, it is worth a try if you want somewhat Google quality search results for your site!

I rate it a 7/10.

[N]F

Hey Thanks lott

This search Engine is awsome and No Doubt that it resembles the Google Search ....

I used it on my Computer ...
It was installed in a minute without any problems ....
However, the design of Search Engine is not much appealing ...
Can u please tell me how to modify its Design ....

Most Probably I will be using this Search Engine for my own Website
Thanks ...


Regards:
Samya Khalid