RizSilverthorn.net

While Drupal is a fantastic piece of software, there is one area in which it is truly terrible - searching. The built-in search is barely able to search Title and Body fields, let alone CCK or custom fields. Ohh, and if you are looking for Bournemouth for example, Bourne, bourne*, etc wont work. You have to use the full word you are looking for.

There are several modules available to choose from, which enhance the results and features of the core search feature. I have tried the Porter Stemmer module which helps with the partial word searching. The Missing List was running with this solution for some time as it seemed to be working correctly, but for some reason it has stopped being as effective as it should be. Strange things like it couldn't find the word Audi in anything but the title for some reason.

Another quick search on drupal.org reveal some very promising alternatives - Google CSE and Apache Solr for example. Each have their pros and cons. Google CSE, for example, requires adverts (not a bad thing, IMHO). However, it does restrict the width of the search results to 500px if you have ads top/top & bottom, or 795 for ads on the right of the search results. Apache Solr does not require adverts, but does require a separate server to run on your hardware which for some people may not be possible (shared hosting).

I am going to do some more investigating into the setup of each and post my findings here (I'll let you in on a secret now though - we have settled on Solr for TML site search).