Which search technology to use with ASP.NET?

Question

What's your preferred method of providing a search facility on a website? Currently I prefer to use Lucene.net over Indexing Service / SQL Server full-text search (as there's nothing to set up server-side), but what other ways are being used out there?

Answer 1

I also recommend SOLR. It's easy to set up, maintain, and configure. I've found it to be stable and easy to scale. There's a c# package for interfacing with solr.

Answer 2

Take a look at Solr. It uses Lucene for text indexing, but it is a full blown http server so you can post documents over http and do search using urls. The best part is that it gives you faceted searching out of the box which will require a lot of work if you do it yourself.

Answer 3

dtSearch is one we've often used, but I'm not really that big a fan of it.

Answer 4

A lot of people are using Google's custom search these days; even a couple of banks that I know of use it for their intranet.

Answer 5

If you need to index all the pages of your site (not just the ones Google indexes) or if you want to create a search for your intranet web sites, the Google Mini is pretty sweet. It will cost you some money, but it is really easy to have it up and running within just a couple of hours. Depending on how many pages you need to index it can be expensive though.

Answer 6

you could use google, it's not going to be the fastest indexer but it does provide great results when you have no budget.