Sphider

Author:

This is the first time I have ventured into using a script like this, but I was presently surprised! It worked perfectly the first time. The setup instructions were clear and within half an hour I was already indexing my site at www.ebooksolutionstore.com The only issue I had and this was related to my webhost provider was that the indexing would stop after about 300-500 urls, but after restarting the process it would continue where it left off. A bit of a pain, but so far I would give Spider 4 out of 5 rating.

Author: sergiot

This script is very good, admin panel is really functional and usefull and the results presentation in cool! I think I'll go to use it in my site

Author: Chimera

Sphider has a low server load rate, so the indexing speed is very high. This script is better than the others, even than paid search engine scripts. It has many options, like categories, keywords, reindex sites auto. , and many more !!! Really great search engine with spider !!!

Author:

Sphider is an all around good engine. The mySQL backend is quite efficient and the admin panel allows you to clean out the db whenever necessary. It also uses robots.txt to exclude certain areas and further allows you to include or exclude upon indexing/reindexing. Finally, it's template driven and so customization is pretty simple. My biggest problems w/ Sphider are as follows: 1.) Installation is rather manual; it should do a checklist type of situation. 2.) There are pagination errors in one of the functions whenever more than 1 page of results are listed. I think this happens after reindexing a link, but I'm not sure. 3.) There needs to be a progress bar when indexing/reindexing or anything else. The engine still ends up pretty slow for larger sites. All in all, it's free and a fantastic start to a really nice engine.