fast searches with PHP
Here's another one for the "I should have done this a long time ago" list. I had been experiencing some problems with mt-search.cgi on this installation; it was using up too much memory on the server (this is also why I switched to using Tagwire for showing my tags).
Now I'm using the PHP-based Fast Search and it works great. It took me a little while to figure it out but once I got it down, setting it up for each of my blogs was a snap. You can test it out using the search form in the sidebar of the blog.
The one oddity I found, which may be due to something weird on my end, is that it didn't like the "fastsearch" filename for the search template and the Dynamic Pages Error Template would claim "Page not found". This caused me a lot of confusion. However, I found that it worked fine if I used a different output filename for the template. The rest was easy from there.
This is a great plugin and I especially recommend it to anyone who finds that mt-search.cgi is slow or is using up too many server resources.
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Comments
Thanks for the tips. I use Tagwire and KeywordExtractor for my blogs and a little coding in the htaccess file to send static-looking tag URLs to the MT-search routine. Unfortunately the sites go down once a week or so due to excessive memory use. I've actually disabled some of this but Google's remembering the tags and still indexing them. I'll try Fast Search and see if it helps.
Posted by: Martin Kelley | January 13, 2007 06:50 AM
Yeah, sometimes its the search engine spiders that kill you, especially if you're using search templates for tags. I had the same thing happen to me.
Posted by: Al-Munaqabah | February 22, 2007 03:22 AM