Why you shouldn't create your own search engine

Whilst at my computer desk, I was watching the Saturday game between Newcastle United verses West Bromich Albion. I had the girlfriend just waking up by the sun breaking between the curtains. I thought to myself, 'what should be my first thing to do today...
November 6, 2012
Technical-Confessions

    1. Go for a run or hit the gym?
    2. Give my undivided attention to my beloved football team??
    3. Maybe join my hot girlfriend in bad for snuggles???
Before you guess correctly (because you're not stupid, you know I didn't do one of the 3 above), I actually decided to initiate a construction of a search engine within my own website. This was mentioned in the New features developed blog, that it works by searching the database with certain strings values, and that was it. It worked, though thats about as much as I can say about the feature.

In fact, it sucked!
It lacked any string associations and correlations between other strings If I put 'Orcle Database', most people would immediately assume that this meant Oracle though spelt incorrectly. In fact, this search engine that I created would only look at miss spell words that matched the string.

Another thing was that if you inserted more than 2 works, it would not use those words, it would in fact become one lengthy string, then try and match that lengthy string with other exact values in the database.

Performance was also a potential issue as I increased the database blogs in a linear fashion.


Alternative Solution?

I could go on for a while though I want to point you towards the FREE google custom search. It allows me to 'plugin' the google capabilities within my own constructed website. It like a have a mini-google...I will call it 'moogle' (the words 'mini and google' concatenated).

You can now see it working in the near the top-right of this page.

About the author

Daniel is a Technical Manager with over 10 years of consulting expertise in the Identity and Access Management space.
Daniel has built from scratch this blog as well as technicalconfessions.com
Follow Daniel on twitter @nervouswiggles

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