I’m having to build a directory type website that will be fairly feature intensive on the search side of things.
It will have a lot of Doctors in it (Doctors’ names, addresses, biographys, specialties, etc). All of this will be stored in a database. There will be a few preferred member doctors, who, when showing up as a search result, will be at the top of the search above all others.
I need the user to be able to search by entering their query into ONE field, with the option of adding their zip code to a second field by the search (but is not required). If they add their zip code, the search will bring up doctors closest to them first (like a Google local search). If they don’t enter their zip code, can I geo-target them and still use the same feature to show doctors closest to them first?
I’m entering all of the doctors information into a database table, because I don’t want to have to manually create a page for each doctor that would take forever as there are over 4,000 doctors. I’m going to just create a page they can each log onto to type their info into fields and hit submit and have that place it in the tables for me. (this I’m fine with, I can handle).
Can anyone suggest a search engine or search tool/program I can use that I can tweak to get this all to work?
I’ve used Sphider on several sites and really like it, but I can’t imagine how I could use it and get all of these features. I know this is a very ambitious project, so any help anywhere is invaluable.
Thank you all! Wish me luck!
I just need to understand one thing, as you said, the doctors data is listed a table of your database, so why you need an extra or third party tool to search? You are able to write a search script for your table easily.
As I understood too, your table includes about 4000 records, I have an application has a table includes 6236 records, Verses of the Quran and I manage my own search through it easily.