Recently, im my work at Ingeniería de Prefabricados S.L. (a company part of the prefabricated concrete group Castelo), we needed a search engine in PHP for our corporative web.

After evaluating a lot of possible options, we found Sphider as the best alternative, because is an out-of-the-box solution with integrated crawler and search engine, buy it works with MySQL as backend.

In our company we prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL, for a lot of things that I’m not going to mention here, so I ported the code to work with PostgreSQL in one morning.

Here are the sources, we started from version 1.3.4, and we are not planning to release new versions.

Souce code 72KB sphider-1.3.4pg.tgz

We also changed two things:

• Now it index uppercase accented characters.
• Js suggest not to use UTF-8

As a TO-DO, admin database tools were not ported, and the installations cannot be made from the web app. To know more about database management, look for Couchbase.

Thanks to group Castelo, for giving me permission to publish this code in my blog.