So you need to install a search engine on your site. Keeping with my open source solutions, I have decided to go with ht://Dig. As soon as Apple decided to go with UNIX as a back end to their OS, I was excited because I could finally use ht://Dig (and another classic program called Mailman) I will always be grateful to both communities (ht://Dig and Mailman) because I learned so much about compiling and not to be afraid of source files. I have used ht://Dig for a few years with minimal complaints. You will need to compile ht://Dig, so make sure you have Apple’s Development Package (Xcode).
No need to re-create the wheel, so to compile/install ht://Dig, follow these directions. Before you actually compile everything, you will need to apply a patch that came out since the instructions were made. download the patch: ftp://ftp.ccsf.org/htdig-patches/3.1.6/htnotifyNull.0 and change the actual ntnotify source file with the corrected variables. After you have applied the patch, you can then complile the source while following the directions from the link above.
To customize the result pages, you can edit the html files in the /common folder so the search pages look seemless with your web site.
If you are going to use ht://Dig on multiple sites (your Virtual Hosts), simply create multiple conf files and multiple db directories, one for each site so that all of your site indexing is separate.
You are also able to add multiple attributes into each conf file to further customize your install. A comprehensive list of all the attrributes for the conf file can be found on ht://Dig’s web site.
So if you want to use a tried and true search engine, give ht://Dig a shot. A new version should be coming soon!
