microsoft index server

yep I'm using index services on a win2k advanced server, its not anything spesh, but its simple and easy to use, and comes free with win2k/AS.

this intranet or internet you developing here?
If internet, id perhaps look a third solution totally depending on your server environment and content types. If intranet index services would probably suffice.

Thanks, hagar. It's internet. An on-line journal for a non profit dealing with solar energy, in Italian.

I've been forced to use MS solutions (FP extensions) before with this client because of the limitations of their hosting package. And though there haven't been many problems, when there are, it is always a pain.

Do you have to publish the site with FrontPage in order to get it to index new pages? Or can you schedule and/or manually prompt it to index?

Was it easy to set up the search page?

Thanks again.

http://www.aspalliance.com/ had some decent tutorials on setting up a search page for index services

Index Services should index your pages that are in the web root and subsequent subdirectories regardless of what they have been designed in. It should read all html files, pdf's, word documents, and anything else you stuff into it.

Frontpage isnt neccessary to make indexing work and adds no code of value to the page to make it index, its all server side. The only thing you must be aware of, index services will not look at database info, so if you have pages that are dynamic and draw content from a DB, make sure that page has sufficient meta tags for description, keywords etc so index server can find it. I've found that using dublin core meta tags (http://dublincore.org/) work best with MS index services.

Index services is a pretty basic dopey search engine, you can use anything you want to make it index better, hidden fields, 0 x 0 div fields etc etc. With index server you will need it, because it doesnt always return the best result, you will need to guide it.

Hope all this helps. If you have any other questions, message me or whatever:D

ciao

Thanks again hagar. By publishing in frontpage, I didn't mean designing the site in FP, I meant using their "publish" feature to upload the site. This is required with frontpage extensions. It does some "magic" as it uploads.

OK, based on what I've heard, I will push for the atomz solution and fall back on index server if necessary.

yeah I used to design with frontpage and use their magical publish feature too, allowing frontpage to rewrite my code became a serious pain tho, so eventually I abandoned FP alltogether and now just code by hand, extensions never did a damn thing anyway:rolleyes:

Only thing FP ever did that I was glad it did, was track what pages I had changed and only uploaded those specific ones. Apart from that, it drove me up the wall;-)

Now days I just use dreamweaver and notepad, its more work but its a better result.

good luck with your engine.