products search engine

[mandeep82]

hi

i am a newbie and setting up the affiliate website. but i am using a php search engine which has a limit and not work with more than 100000 links.

what do people use for search in these kind of product search websites? what does kelkoo and others use??
please help ......

[John Jupp]

Hi Mandeep. Most people will use a custom script (written to order) to deal with high volumes. Mine category maps 1,500,000 products in 90 minutes into a MySQL database and then displays entire pages almost instantly. If you use a dedicated rather than a shared server, there's no real limit on the number of requests or storage. It all depends on the applications you are looking to employ and how the script is configured.

[mandeep82]

hi john

we have got the dedicated server but i want to know what custom scripts do people use as a search engine ? are there any that are available open source to index the database and return the search results...

[John Jupp]

Mandeep. Just a quick question. You're looking at the Kelkoo model of display rather than price comparison yes? If so then any script would search by a set number of fields. It would also search by looking for comparable keys.

For instance the kelkoo model starts off with say for example:
desktop > dell > price > processor type > processor speed > display results.

So the search query starts with a basic category and then looks at the field covering price. It then goes into the technical specs and searches for particular criteria. All of that is field based and your script performs a number of separate searches until the final query is made. What it effectively does is narrow the number of records according to the field parameters. All of that requires interaction with the customer as they initiate every section of the search.

It can be written. Haven't a clue how long it would take to build but you get the bare bones principal behind it all. I'd advise you hunt around script writers who'd be willing to take on a project like that.

Yes we could do it but I'm not taking on any more work until next year as we're fully booked until the end of January.

[mandeep82]

i have got the script but it indexes the pages and stores the keywords in the array and link the pages having those keywords, but uses a lot of memory as it is storing everything in arrays.
i want something that indexes the database.

[John Jupp]

Add me to msn. I'll look into this further when time allows.

[moredial]

There is a perl script which I have used called homepagesearchengine from ANET.at

That does index pages rather than database and you need to re-run the script each time the pages are updated.

Works off a search box and displays pages from your site that are relevant to the search term used - has filtering options available as per the main search engines - which makes it rather powerful.

Prices vary from free, depending on what you want.

The update script takes a little while to run. After that, searches are very quick.

[mandeep82]

thanks a lot .
how long does the script takes to run and for how many products??

[moredial]

Originally Posted by mandeep82 thanks a lot . how long does the script takes to run and for how many products??

How long is a piece of string?

On over 140 static php pages, average 40 Mb, it was probably less than a minute - just felt longer. You can block files which you don't want indexed and that helps to speed the indexing time.

Download the free version and see if it meets your needs. It is all the same script, just the free version has some features which are blocked until you purchase the key.

[mandeep82]

thanks a lot for this information