I’m creating a site that is running on a shared server and I need to find a good search engine. What search engine framework should I use to fit my requirements?
Here are some requirements
- ~100,000 documents need to be indexed
- Shared Server (but can run ASP.Net and php apps)
- Need to be able to restrict search results to specific tags, categories
- Need to be able to sort by relevance + popularity, or relevance + date
- A search is preformed on every page load (although i might implement caching). The way it works is kind of like stackoverflow. I have a main document and then suggestions for related documents are loaded on the right. This occurs on every page
- Software is free and has very little budget for any type of hosted search solution (at this time anyway)
Here are my thoughts
- zend lucene search – performance is not good enough for such a large site
- Google custom search – number of sites/queries is limited
- Solr, Sphinx, java lucene – on a shared server so I cannot install these
- Lucene.net – I’m not sure if this is is possible. My hosting company allows me to run php and asp.net websites…but perhaps Lucene.net has to run as a separate process?
- MySql FullText search – I am not aware of performance for large sites like I have described
This seems like a tough bill to satisfy but I’m hoping I don’t need to come up with an alternative design.
For this kind of features, and such a big number of documents, I would absolutly not go with MySQL’s fulltext : I would definitly use some external indexing/searching solution (like Solr, Lucene, …)
Like you said :
Not sure about Lucene.NET, but with that kind of volume of data, can you really not get your own server, so you can install what you need to work properly ?
And that’s especially true if search is an important part of your application (it seems it is).