php search engine

Anon

Hi,
I would like to design a search engine in PHP. Is this possible? I would like to go to various sites, and read the url content and index for searching. I can easily write a script to do my work, but i am stuck on its deployment. How do I run the sript so that it runs continously and extracts the info for two or three days ? How do i avoid the script timeout ? How should i design it so that system resources are conserved ?
One way i know is to have two scripts, each one calling the other one at the end. this way, two scripts would continously run!

What is Cron, can I use this to accomplish my job ? Can i make a cgi executable with php and run it from the command prompt?
Please help.

Anon

Hi! AFAIK and IMHO isn't a very good idea to make a seacrh engine using PHP... it will consume a lot of resources of your machine, an it seems to me that it'll gonna be very slow.

HTH

inK

Anon

You probably wouldn't use a PHP page. If you desperately wanted to use php then just run it from the command prompt. I think the script timeout is related to the webserver so that shouldn't affect you. I'm not entirely sure how php works on Unix. You might need to have it installed as a CGI rather than an Apache module, so you have an interpreter that's available to the system. On windows running "php.exe scriptname" will run a script like normal executable.

But like inKel said, writing it in PHP is a really bad idea. Unless you're just doing it for the challenge, in which case a working search engine will probably earn you boatloads of respect from the PHP community. 🙂

Anon

I want to design a search engine in PHP anyway. Just to see how it works. Can anyone give me any starters? Like a platform independant way to read directorystructures?

Great fun this is, not?

Anon

Well.... ok sayin' that will overload the machine... which language to use then?

Anon

Hello,

Check out www.pyroxpro.com, that search engine is written completly in php, its the only "crawling" php engine I know of, is that what you are looking for? If so email me, and I will send you the code.
(thats me)

-PyroX