Replacements for Google Site Search

[DadsWorksheets]

Just left a comment on this article referencing my experience with ZoomSearch; hope it bounces a couple of interested folks your direction. Might be worth one of you guys dropping in and posting a note yourself.

I'd used Google Site Search a while ago (the free version with the ads... ugh) and glad I found you guys. ZoomSearch has been working great at DadsWorksheets!

[Ray]

Thanks! We've been meaning to get the word out there since Google Site Search's demise, but have been too busy working on the product itself to spare the time! (On that note, new build coming soon)

We hope that by making and supporting a good product, and with good will from users like yourself, the word will get out. So we appreciate it.

[kpa]

I suppose the raising of this subject was inevitable. I'm a very big fan of ZOOM as attested to in previous posts but for a particular project I used Google Custom Search (the paid one). Alas Google have grandfathered it and that's a real pain for me! (I'm seizing the opportunity to raise this again Ray The reason I opted for Google over ZOOM for a particular project was because of a perennial problem with ZOOM doing large indexing operations. If anything interrupts the indexing process process then you have to start all over again. Yes you can do things like gradually introduce new start points but sooner or later you have to re-crawl the whole thing because you've made a small tweak to your settings. Wouldn't it be nice if ZOOM could periodically save and if there was a crash or something else, pickup from the last save. With Google binning my site (I won't use the ad based version full stop) it looks like I'm back to grappling with this issue again I've done a lot of research for a replacement for Google but ZOOM is still my very best favourite all save this issue!!

[David]

Yes, if you are indexing a huge number of files, then you need a stable fast machine. Preferably physically close to the web site being indexed to reduce latency. If you can't get your desktop machine stable (or your internet connection isn't stable), then there are options for building the index in the cloud. (e.g. rent an Amazon web services machine for a day to build the index).

As you point out you can do incremental indexing. But it is more time consuming to get it setup this way. Incremental indexing also increases the indexing time, but so does having your machine crash.

[sizbut]

The answer to slow crawl indexing of course is offline mode - much faster. If I tried to spider my site it would be several hours. And if you don't have an offline copy of your websites contents then that's a whole heap of other questions.