Comments on: Indexing an intranet for personal search?

Question: Indexing an intranet for personal search?

cameradv — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:04:46 -0800

At my company, I've despaired in convincing IT to add a search option to a long list of policy documents on the corporate intranet. Is there software that can index these policies on my own computer, to build a personal search engine? Something like Google Desktop but for an intranet?

By: dudeman

dudeman — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:20:22 -0800

Do you have network access to the policy documents via Windows filesharing? If so, Google Desktop may be your answer. I believe you can configure it to index a set of documents on a network fileshare.

By: kcm

kcm — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:21:55 -0800

It's a bit heavyweight, but there's Nutch for your web search engine needs.

By: cameradv

cameradv — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:35:59 -0800

dudeman: no, currently I don't have access to the files on a network drive.

By: mbrubeck

mbrubeck — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:36:27 -0800

If you have a budget, there's the Google Search Appliance or the (much cheaper) Google Mini.

By: mbrubeck

mbrubeck — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:37:10 -0800

(oops, but those don't run on your own computer, so you probably can't do that without IT's support.)

By: revgeorge

revgeorge — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:44:16 -0800

If the documents will fit on your hard drive, you could always use wget to mirror the documents and then use Google Desktop to search them on your own hard drive.

By: The Michael The

The Michael The — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 08:15:53 -0800

If you're using or have access to a Mac OSX machine (unlikely in Corporate-land, but on the off chance...), Spotlight will search within documents, whether on your machine or on the network (mount the drive and set up Spotlight to search it). You can even add tags (by hand or with Quicksilver, which is amazingly efficient at it) on which to search.

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 09:39:16 -0800

I thought there was a 3rd party plugin for Google desktop that would let you index documents over http.

By: mmascolino

mmascolino — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 10:00:17 -0800

Depending on how often those docs are updated/new ones are added, you could just use Google Desktop and visit each of those docs in your web browsers. Then Google Desktop will index those docs. The downside of this is that if those documents change frequently, you won't be getting index updates until you visit the documents again.

By: RikiTikiTavi

RikiTikiTavi — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 10:21:22 -0800

Google desktop can index pages that you've visited, so that's an option.

If you're looking for an open source indexer to run at the server end, try Apache Lucene.