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I am looking for a personal search engine to index all my data, be it local or remote, so that I can find my own stuff easily.
Folders, tags, bookmarks, these are all annoying, a search engine is what I need. Is this possible already? Or should I start a company for this? :D
Sphider or (better) Sphider Plus will do pretty well for that.
I've found them both great. They are pretty much the same except that Sphider Plus is a thousand times better - think of the original as a 'lite' version. This is really a rec. for Sphider plus and that's the feature set I'll be primarily talking about.
To set that up in your case you'll need to install a [L]AMP stack - I'm not a regular Linux user but I believe that XAMPP is a good single download option. You'll need to enable directory listing and adjust the Apache VirtualHosts file (which will be located somewhere like this: Apache<versionnumber>\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf).
The code you'll want will depend on what files you want searchable; I'd suggest something like this (using Windows paths but just change the paths as desired/required): - I'll be refering to these throughout these instructions but they are example only really.
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/Users/Nick/Desktop"
ServerName www.desktop.loc
ServerAlias desktop.loc
<Directory "C:/Users/Nick/Desktop">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/Users/Nick/Pictures"
ServerName www.pictures.loc
ServerAlias pictures.loc
<Directory "C:/Users/Nick/Pictures">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
and add to your OS hosts files:
127.0.0.1 desktop.loc
127.0.0.1 www.desktop.loc
127.0.0.1 pictures.loc
127.0.0.1 www.pictures.loc
Then install Sphider - Plus is probably better since it has easily set-up automated re-indexing. Probably want to make a new vhost location for search.loc or something for easy access.
Next add picture.loc and desktop.loc and any external locations to the Sphider index; it'll take a while depending on number of files etc. then you are good to go :D
Features:
I have found YaCy to be a wonderful tool.
Web Search by the people, for the people
YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.
So far so good, at least much much better than Google custom search, since you can index virtually every page of your target domain.
One drawback is it's sensitive to word suffixes, i.e. you may not get a result when you search for "matrix" if the actual word is "matrices". Maybe there is a configuration for this somewhere, but I don't know how to do it yet.
