00333: integrate a better, external search engine
Description: Pm has often declared that for advanced search capabilities it would probably be better to integrate another search engine into a site than to build advanced searching directly into PmWiki. (For one, an external search engine can better index attachments and items that aren't directly served by PmWiki.)
It is also in tune with the unix philosophy of orthogonal tools that do separate things in industrial strength.
Some rule of thumb for when another search engine makes sense would be helpful. I imagine that on a P4 3GHz with 1GB RAM a site with 20000 records on a reiserfs, the default search may be getting annoyingly slow. But I am only guessing.
This PITS is just a placeholder to write up a cookbook recipe of good ways to achieve this. Possible search engine candidates include
- http://swish-e.com and
- http://mnogosearch.org
- htDig is another one, but getting rather long in the tooth.
- http://lucene.apache.org/
All these candidates are GPL compatible.