Hi all

 

I have never been to a forum before but my hosting company I use who I asked this question to said forums are your best bet as you will get other users views and experience. So here I am

 

 

I am developing a website for my friend. He needs it to search other website and display the results on his. after a lot of searching today I have found Sphider the php search engine. My hosting company said they have heard of it and Sphider Pro is the new version 3.1,

 

Has any one used sphider pro before? They have a demo on their website and it returns results pretty dam fast 0.01 seconds on the demo, the demo says its index just over 1,300 links, but says its been tested on shared hosting with over 500,000 links

 

Could any one give me their opinion of this open source software?

 

thanks

As Sphider Pro is available as free download for a while now at

http://code.google.com/p/sphiderpro/downloads/list

and also at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sphiderpro/?source=directory

I felt free to do so.

 

Here is my review on the product.

 

Summarization: Very disappointing.

 

Statement of reasons:

 

Announced to take over from Sphider-plus with big Tam-Tam and a lot of polemic, the Sphider Pro scripts are still very close to the original Sphider, which was released in 2009. As I already stated in another posting: . . . it seems they just added some old mods like 'Follow sitemap.xml' and 'Erase & Re-index' to the original Sphider. I've published all these mods in the original Sphider forum several years ago. Adding them to the original Sphider, now they call it Sphider Pro. Okay, in order to remain fair: they also implemented some ideas from Sphider-plus. . . .

 

But in front of the original Sphider the most important improvements are missing:

- No UTF 8 support. Thus, unable to search for queries in Cyrillic, Japanese, German and other languages.

- Indexing of iframes is not supported.

- Not indexing any kind of feeds.

- No support for IDN URLs.

- Uable to search with wildcards.

- Suggesting to index PDFs, DOCs, etc, the regarding converter are not included.

- Suggesting to contain several search modes, nothing of it is implemented.

- Suggesting to index images, not working.

- Multiple database support is not jet implemented, just separated permission for admin and user in one db.

- Secondary sitemaps are not supported. As result, no links are found.

Application hint: Useless to uncheck the regarding option in Admin settings. The scripts always follow the links in sitemap.xml. It is not that I want to debug the scripts, but please boys, it is not enough to set and unset the variable $follow_sitemap in your config file. You additionally need to use this variable in your script …/admin/spider.php

 

By the way, also the well-known bugs of original Sphider, for example in category search, are still present.

 

Regarding the documentation: Thank you for leaving 'Sphider-plus' as part of your poor documentation. Thus all users are well informed from whom you copied it. Because of my limited English knowledge, even my grammar errors remained!

 

To all early adaptors: The release date of Sphider Pro version 3.1 is defined in the docs to Nov. 26, 2012. But having a look at the 'last modified' date of the scripts: Often their date and time is newer than November 26. Are they still debugging their first official release? In order to get always the latest debug version, it might become necessary to write a small batch job for a daily download. Perhaps in the next future the bugs in 'follow sitemap.xml' will become fixed?

 

It is a great pity that I wasted my time with these scripts. I really was keen to learn from the scripts, which pretend to take over from Sphider-plus. But as in the past, I will be obliged to do it all by my selves.

 

Tec

 

 

I really was keen to learn from the scripts, which pretend to take over from Sphider-plus. But as in the past, I will be obliged to do it all by my selves.

 

Tec

 

 

Hi all,

 

sounds like Tec is a competitor of Sphider Pro, But as in the past, " I will be obliged to do it all by my selves" so really wouldnt be a fair review. I have tried Sphider Pro, we use it in work on clients sites,

 

Suggesting to index images, not working. yes it does work, and works well thats the main reason why we use it, I will not comment on all the thinks listed, People this is just one mans comments, (sounds a bit bitter)

 

I have Sphider Pro make modifications for us which they do over night, our clints email them, replies back within the hour, their support is almost 24 hours a day, The script works and works well, yes not much sytle has gone in but its the main program thats required not style.

 

I have tried the version linked to here in this forum, seems some parts of the code are missing compared to the version we download direct from Sphider Pro's website. But Tec your name comes up everywhere moaning about Sphider Pro, Every post has your name or Sphider-plus linked to it some where some how., Compatition is healthy, wronfully slating a product is wrong,

 

Maybe you shouldnt have gone with an unoffical version. but thats just my opinion people.

 

I have not tried sphider plus so I cannot comment which is better, all i can say is sphider pro works, unlike the comments above, and their support do pretty much anything you ask of them, with reason.

 

plus the new release is out soon with further updates.

Hi
I also used sphider, it is a great search application, but it generate errors in the new php versions, 5.4+.
I found another free php search engine script similar to Spider, it is called SSEP :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/site-search-engine-php-ajax/
Does anyone else use it, or tested it? Is it safe?