Free Perl Site Search Engine CGI Scripts

Let your visitors search your site with your own search engine


Free Perl Site Search Engine CGI Scripts

Allow your visitors to search your site with your very own search engine. The Perl search engines here may work by crawling your site at the time the visitors request it to, or it may require you to index your site prior to using it. The former is generally easier to install (since you do not need to remember to re-index your site each time you update it), while the latter is more efficient for larger sites (it works faster and uses less server resources).

All scripts here require you to have CGI access on your web server. If you do not have CGI-BIN access, you should look at the Free Search Engine Hosting Services page, which will host the search engine script for you. You may also want to check out the Free Site Search Engine PHP Scripts page for PHP search engine scripts. My article on How to Install a Search Engine on your Website is probably useful as a primer if you are new to putting up a search engine on your website.

In addition, if you get an internal server error after installing your script, you may be interested in this article: Perl CGI Debugging: How to Solve a 500 Internal Server Error.

Related Pages

Free Perl Search Engines

Site Search

A search engine CGI script that searches the documents on your site for keywords. You can request that your search string be matched exactly or as a pattern.

Simple Search

This Perl script is from Matt Wright's archive. It does a search of all documents on your site when the user requests for a search (ie, it does not pre-index your site). The engine supports Boolean expressions in your search string.

Perlfect CGI Search Engine Script

[Update: this site is no longer available. However, since the script was released under the GNU General Public License, it may be possible to still find it in some third-party repository somewhere. Note though that you should probably get it from a reliable source, so that you don't end up with a malware-infested version.] Perlfect Search is a Perl based search engine script designed for those with large sites. It's supposed to be able to handle even sites with 1000+ pages in a reasonable time. It is able to use any DBM compatible module found on the system, such as SDBM, NDBM, etc. The program is released under the GNU General Public Licence and is "sophisticated, powerful, versatile, customizable" and is loaded with features. If you have a huge site, you might need this to get fast search results. Like other search engine scripts designed for large sites, you have to run an indexer (or spider) separately on your site to update the search engine database.

Fluid Dynamics Search Engine

[Update: this script is no longer available.] This is a Perl based search engine that builds either a flat-file text database or a MySQL database (at your option) at indexing time. When your visitor enters a search term, it will only search that database. It is template based, so you can customise its appearance with the look and feel of your site. Among the search engine scripts that I have evaluated, this probably offers the richest set of search queries possible, handling not only Boolean searches, but case-sensitive and case-insensitive searches, phrase searching, search for specific attributes (eg words in the body, title, keywords, etc), and so on. The author notes that since it is rich in features, it is likely to be a bit more server-intensive than other search engines which have fewer features. Note that the engine obliges you to display the link to the developer's website.

Htgrep

[Update: this script is no longer available.] This powerful search engine script allows you to use either Boolean or regular expressions in your queries. However, you need to supply a search file, which will be used by the script to locate the appropriate documents. Update: this script is no longer supported.

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