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I got down and dirty with php this Saturday. After seeing what Peter Cooper did with Ruby, I wanted a similar search engine for Digital Photography. So I cobbled one together using the google coop.

I spent about 8 hours working on this. I was in the zone. I spent a lot of time trying to reverse engineer the google stuff. At the time I was building this page, parts of the google coop page were broken. Basically,

1. The look and feel section for the engine stopped working
2. I could not update the list of sites for the search engine
3. I could not make changes to the search engine description

I also learnt how to create a search plugin for Firefox/Mozilla. I was amazed how easy it is. It is so easy that you can write a script which takes a search URL (after you type in your query) for a search engine to create a plugin for firefox. While I am on this, IE7 does exactly that. I dont know what they were thinking. They expect a user to search for a predetermined string and then copy the URL somewhere. Crazy two step process! What they dont know is a lot of users dont know what a URL is. I have no idea why they didn’t implement something like Mozilla. I guess thats their way of securing the browser. Give me a one click plugin installer please. Ok away from my rant.

I was pretty impressed with how easy it is to use PHP. Deploying Ruby on rails requires a PhD in configuring Apache. Lucky for me I’ve played around with Apache enough to know how to configure it. I would definitely use PHP again for a small, quick project like this.

The artwork is not mine. I can’t do computer art if my life depended on it. The icon is from The Tango Desktop Project

Visit Digital Photography Search

Here is a screenshot.

Peter Cooper beat me to it. I started doing this with google coop but never got around to finishing it. I’ve been busy with work as usual. He even added a firefox plugin for it. Great job.

Here is the link http://www.rubyinside.com/search/

I just found out that Google sells a Google Search Appliance I was surprised that it gets away with the prices it charges. This thing is nothing but a box which indexes documents you point it to and then lets you perform searches on it. The only cool thing this appliance does is that in indexes 220 different file formats.

Integrating everything is nice and all but charging $30,000+ per box is thievery. The software is trivial to write and the hardware doesn’t need to be extraordinary. The Google trademark plays a BIG factor here.

I am surprised there is no open source project out there which aims to tackle this.