Best way to create a sitesearch in ASP.NET

Question

Which is the best way to create a site search engine for a dynamic asp.net site with hundreds of dynamic pages. I have seen many products and articles

http://www.karamasoft.com/UltimateSearch/overview.aspx

http://www.sitesearchasp.net

http://www.easysearchasp.net/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163355.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/asp/indexserver.aspx

Answer 1

Priyan,

Another high-quality open-source option would be the .NET port of Lucene

• CodeProject - Introducing Lucene

• dotlucene

• lucene.net

You haven't mentioned Google's SiteSearch "product". Is one of your requirements that you'd like to host the search engine/catalog yourself?

Microsoft also has a product Search Server 2008 Express although I'm not sure if you can install it on any hosting provider.

And (disclaimer: I am the author) there is also a very basic open source project on CodeProject called Searcharoo (also at searcharoo.net). It is really meant as a 'demonstration/learning experience' - hence the six how to articles - but it might suffice for a small dynamic site.

I have used SQL Server Full Text Search for some projects - works well but it's really just searching database content, not a combination of static and dynamic Html/Pdf/Word/Jpg etc documents which a "real" web crawler will do.