[TYPO3-english] Combine normal search and news search

[Jigal van Hemert]

Richard Jäger wrote:
> I tried also once indexed_search, but thats the worst search engine ive 
> ever seen (maybe i configured it wrong), but it was more than just slow....

As stated in the extension, it's built for features not fo speed. But 
with the correct configuration you can get quite reasonable result. At 
least it has the features that you can search on pages, in database 
tables (e.g. tt_news records) and in files (even inside various file 
formats). It also takes into account the access restrictions for the 
current user.

> I mean, you can also search in the normal db for example by phpmyadmin, 
> so it has to be possible too in the frontend, or am i wrong?
Searching is a little more complicated than that! You don't want to 
search in menu's, HTML tags, javascript, etc. so the engine has to take 
that into account. Most people do not want to find very small and/or 
very common words, so that has to be filtered too.
Furthermore, you don't want pages or parts of pages where a visitors has 
no access to ending up in the search results, so that has to be taken 
into account to.

Mnogosearch is another search engine which is available to TYPO3. It 
requires a seperate application (unix/linux only AFAIK) on the server 
and cannot deal with access restricted content. It is however rather 
fast and produces relevant results with a simple search form.

There are also other search engines (Powersearch for example) which also 
rely on external engines.

I came across the extension "Extended Search (SG)" key: st_search. From 
the description
"Extends Standard-Search with search in Plugins tt_news/sg_newsplus, 
sg_glossary, sg_address and sg_prodprom so far. Theoretically extendable 
by TS to search also any other tables. Please wait for coming Docu."
it seems that this may solve your particular problem.


-- 
Jigal van Hemert.