Question

I am implementing an eCommerce application using ASP.Net. I would like to know if custom Google search is sufficient enough or if we plan to go implement our search functionality.. how do we go about doing it?

Ideas and Suggestions and best practices are most welcome.

Regards,
Abdel Olakara

Answer 1

If you don’t plan on using Google Search then you really have 2 options:

1. If you are using SQL Server you can put all of your site text into ntext or varbinary fields so that it is search-able. Then if you have files like PDFs etc you can put the files into a table as varbinary and create a Full Text Catalog to search them. For PDFs you will need to have iFilter installed, it is part of the free Adobe Reader package. There are other iFilters. Check out http://www.ifilter.org/ for more info on them.
2. If you are using asp.net hosted on a windows server you can use the Windows Indexing Service and put any of the data that you want into text file or any other file format. You might still need iFilters for those formats.

I would suggest option 1 if you don’t go with Google. It can be a little more complex but option 2 can have the issue that everything starts to look like it is being saved in a giant heap. You can also do some combination of 1 and 2.