Search facility on my site

nigelh70638339  wrote I have been trying this for ages and nothing has really helped and I am just going round in circles. My site contains thousands of individual pages that I want be found quickly and without using the Google Search which I currently have. The site is basically split between country and then further split into brand and some are split by year. I have installed MAMP (as I am using a Mac) and tried to create a database. I discovered that there were not enough rows (only 40 max) and looked into it. This led me to discovering that I need to create php pages which I did containing a search box and another for the results. Tried it and I was prompted to set up a test server which I did. The result when I tested the pages was that I received an 404 error. Even basic html pages showed the same. Surely there has to be a simplified tutorial, step-by-step to help with this difficult task. I am not afraid of working with it but at the same time I am not comfortable with long passages of text that waffle on about the reasoning of ab and c. I am looking for a simple explanation that will point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance!

Using php like that won't work. Normally when you use php to search a site all the pages main text needs to be stored in a database field so you can write a mysql query to search through the field and return urls, based on the pages unique id, to a results page if any matching words are found or you can set up a keyword column and search through that. I dont think thats an option as if you have thousands of pages it would take a lifetimes work to set up a searchable database, so what you are really looking for is a way to search through your html pages and set up a page which returns any matches to a  results page when found.

These work similar to Google but search within your site. Google is poor because it indexes anything any everything, most of which is out of date and it takes forever to drop the indexing, so if you have a site that changes content regularly its always out of date, which is hugely frustrating for visitors if they keep clicking on information, index by Google, which is no longer available.

Personally I have never used a search facility like I describe because most of the sites I build don't contain thousands of pages and its easy if I do then need to add a search to build something  based on keywords and then return result based on the id of the 'product/page' stored within the database. What you need is a much more generic solution of searching your whole site I would assume.

I think some of the other locals in the forum will have used a database-less solution other than Google, so maybe they will be able to point you in the right direction