Filed under: Search Engine — Ben @ 9:31 pm
My microwave helps me test my software for bugs. I am not kidding.
Of course, I knew the bug existed, but there is nothing like encountering it to really remind you of the problem. You see every time my microwave runs, my wireless stops working. I am sure I can figure out a way to fix that problem, but it also helps me debug the code that I use to make connections out to the internet. If the network is down, I can find those problems.
Turns out the microwave is good at that.
Filed under: Search Engine — Ben @ 10:39 pm
Several months ago I ran across a problem at my day job that I thought I could write a software product for. I have been in the process of converting the company’s web site from Frontpage to a content management solution for about a year. The problem is that I don’t have a good search engine that works for both the CMS content AND the Frontpage content. I have something that works ok for each but I need integrated search results.
So, I started looking for a software product that could do what I needed. Basically, I need a search engine that crawls the site and works with the Microsoft platform (i.e. IIS and SQL Server). I didn’t have the resources (read: money) to purchase something like the Google Search Appliance, nor could I use one of the freely available LAMP-type search solutions. Because of our infrastructure it had to be MS-based.
I was going to build this as a one-off type project at work, but I really feel like there could be a market for this kind of search application for people who don’t have access to the things that are available right now.
So, for the last approximately 45 days, I have been working on the crawler. It is written in C# using the .NET 2.0 framework. The idea was to make it modular enough where I could very easily add file formats to index (right now it only does HTML, plain text and PDF).
I haven’t written the search front-end, but the crawler was the part I thought would be the hardest and it has been. I am still testing stuff, but I think it is about 80% to where it needs to be.
So worst case, this gets absorbed into my work stuff, which I need anyway, and best case, more people are going to need this and I am right!