Indexing an intranet for personal search?

October 3, 2006 7:04 AM

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?
posted by cameradv to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

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.
posted by dudeman at 7:20 AM on October 3, 2006

It's a bit heavyweight, but there's Nutch for your web search engine needs.
posted by kcm at 7:21 AM on October 3, 2006

Response by poster: dudeman: no, currently I don't have access to the files on a network drive.
posted by cameradv at 7:35 AM on October 3, 2006

If you have a budget, there's the Google Search Appliance or the (much cheaper) Google Mini.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:36 AM on October 3, 2006

(oops, but those don't run on your own computer, so you probably can't do that without IT's support.)
posted by mbrubeck at 7:37 AM on October 3, 2006

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.
posted by revgeorge at 7:44 AM on October 3, 2006

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.
posted by The Michael The at 8:15 AM on October 3, 2006

I thought there was a 3rd party plugin for Google desktop that would let you index documents over http.
posted by Good Brain at 9:39 AM on October 3, 2006

Best answer: 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.
posted by mmascolino at 10:00 AM on October 3, 2006

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.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 10:21 AM on October 3, 2006