Question

I’m about to embark on the ASP.net project which involves building a pretty powerful search function. The application is very database heavy. Essentially, organisations will be adding a lot of metadata about themselves in the form of multi-selects, free text boxes etc. which are all stored in SQL 2008.

When it comes to search I’m loath to re-invent the wheel. Normally with a content driven site I’d use a component such as Zoom Search or ASP.net Search engine (http://www.aspnetsearchengine.com/UltimateSearch/Features.aspx)

But I don’t think these type of content driven search controls are apppropriate for what I need given the data driven nature of the search.

I’m thinking full text search is the way to go but then I’m thinking I’ll probably lose a lot of the bells and whistles I’d typically get with a packaged search module like spelling suggestions, document search, synonyms, ignore words etc.

Are there any good hybrid solutions (paid or free) for .net sites that provides these nice features within a search framework of sorts?

Thanks,

Ed

Answer 1

Lucene is pretty highly regarded across a number of languages. It’s in use on some pretty large sites too, i know monster.com use it and their search is pretty extensive.

https://lucene.apache.org/

Edit Found some more resources:

Lucene.Net and SQL Server

SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search (FTS) versus Lucene.NET

http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/Full-Text-Search-in-ASPNET-using-LuceneNET.aspx