Tag system with search for .NET (and ASP.NET)

Question

Is there a good tag search system that i can use in my C# .NET prototype that will also run on ASP.NET ?

Answer 1

When you say "tag search system" I am going to assume that you mean the ability in a social network to allow your users to tag content thereby bubbling up the things that are most popular in your site by way of a tag cloud. Also allowing your users to navigate by way of tagged content, etc. ??

I like to create a SystemObjects table which holds the various tables in my system that might have tags applied to it (or comments, or ratings, etc.) thereby allowing me to have a generic tagging system that can span my entire database. Then I would also have a SystemObjectTags table that would have a reference to the SystemObjectID (telling me which table has the record that I am interested in) as well as the SystemObjectRecordID (which tells me which specific record I am interested in). From there I have all of my detail data with regards to the tags and what was tagged. I then like to keep a running list of the tag specific information in a Tags table which keeps the unique tag (string value of a tag) the TagID (which the SystemObjectTags table references), the count of that tags usage across the system (a summed value of all uses), etc. If you have a high traffic site this data should be kept in your cache so that you don't hit the data too frequently.

With this subsystem in place you can then move to the search capabilities. You have all the data that you need with these three tables to easily be able to perform filtering, searching, etc. However, you might find that there is so much data in here and that the tables are so generic that your searches are not as fast as a more optimized table structure might be. For this reason I suggest that you use a Lucene.NET index to hold all of your searchable data. Lucene.NET provides a very fast read time and provides far more flexibility in search algorithms than SQL Servers freetext stuff does.

This would then allow you to provide filtering of your content by tags, searching for content by tag, tag counts, etc. Lucene.net is a big scary topic though! Be prepared to do some reading to get your past the basics.

Answer 2

An option we are using is to put our "tags" in the Meta Keywords on the page, and then we use Bing for our search.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd251056.aspx

Our architect said it best. "Let the search engines do what they do best. Search."

You can limit the search to your site only, pull back the results and display them yourself...on your own page with your own formatting.

The only downside is that until your site is live and has been indexed, you can't fully test your search.