This is a project that I've been working on and off (mostly
off) for some years now.
The idea is to create a local search engine for just this
site and to actually do the search locally on your browser.
Now I can't claim the original idea was mine, I first saw
the idea in action in the o'reilly book Javascript
application cookbook (now out of print). The search engine
they presented here was pretty limited, mainly by the
limitations of the javascript language of the time, but it
did inspire me to have a play with it. I used the script
from the book pretty much unchanged on my first bit of
commercial freelance web design work I did. Well I say
design, I actually reengineered a site for a now defunct
system builder, called Compuadd. The site had been build in
front page and was worked fine in IE, but didn't really
work so well in anything else (these where the bad old days
of the late 90's, I think).
Anyway during the reengineering I added the javascript page
search, which given it's limitations worked fine. I later
used the same code on a couple of other sites I worked on,
each time tweaking the code to add more features. By the
time I was coming to add the code to one of my sites, it
was becoming clear that I would have to do major work on
the code to get the features I wanted, namely the ability
to limit the search to sub sites and some sort of google
like ranking of the results.
I got bogged down in this rewriting, the site never
actually got put up and the domain expired, so the work got
abandoned.
Fast forward a few years and I started to hear about the
cool new technology called Ajax, javascript and xml. As I
started to read about it I could see that this would give
me a way to have sub site searches, although I don't
actually need those now, and generally make the search work
much better.
I started to play with the basics of fetching xml using
javascript, but then I discovered the many wonderful
javascript libraries that where springing up all over the
web. Libraries like YUI (Yahoo
User Interface) and Dojo. These great libraries
took a lot of the 'heavy lifting' out of the way, so I
could focus on the search code it' self.
At this point I guess about 60% of the code is there and in
my test environment it's working fine in a limited way. The
main problem is building the search database from all of my
web pages. At the moment I have no way to do this
automatically and I'm not sure that I want to automate
this, since I think it needs the human touch. This dose
mean I have over 250 blog entires to index, this is going
to take a while!
However the project is getting close to completion now and
as soon as it dose you will be able to find the source code
here as well details on the hows and whys of the design
decisions I've made.
So watch this space!