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

Has anyone tried Microsoft search server express?

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx

I haven't tried it yet, but it could potentially be powerful.

From the site it looks primarily geared towards sharepoint users but given its sdk I don't see why you couldn't use it for a regular old site search

Answer 2

I'm using dtSearch and I (kind of) like it. The API isn't the greatest in the world for .NET but it can get the job done and it's pretty fast. And it's cheap, so your boss will like it (~$1,000 US).

The results leave something to be desired as it doesn't do any kind of semantic relevance rankings or anything fancy. It does a better job than anything you can get out of MS SQL server though.

It has a web spider that makes it easy to do quick search apps on a website. If you need to you can use the API to create hooks into your database and to provide item level security - but you have to do the work yourself. Their forum leaves something to be desired as well but maybe people will start posting dtSearch stuff here. :)

Answer 3

We used both Lucene.net, Indexing Service and SQL Server full-text. For a project with large and heavy DB search functionality SQL search has an upper hand in terms of performance/resource hit. Otherwise Lucene is much better in all aspects.