I manage a website with about 1,000 articles that need to be searchable by my members.

The site search engines I've tried all had their own problems:

• Fluid Dynamics Search Engine

Since it's written in perl, it was a bit hacky to integrate with my PHP-based CMS. I basically had to file_get_contents the search results page. However, FDSE had the best search results.

• Google CSE

Ugh, the search results SUCK. It can't find documents even using unique strings. I'm so surprised that a Google search product is this bad. Nor can I get any answers on their 'help' forums, and I am a paying user. Boo, Google. Boo.

• Sphider

Again, bad search results. Unable to locate some phrases used in link text. Better results than Google CSE though. Shame on Google that a free PHP script has better search results than their paid application.

• IndexTank

This one looked really promising. I got all set up with their PHP API client. But it would only randomly add articles that I submitted. Out of 700+ articles I pushed to the index through their API, only 8 made it in. Unable to find any help on this subject.

Update for IndexTank -- Got the above issue fixed, so this looks most promising so far.

The site itself runs on php/mysql and FreeBSD, though this shouldn't matter for a web crawling indexer.

I've looked at Lucene, but I don't know anything about Java or installing Java programs on my web server.

I also do not have root access on my web server, if this would be required for installation.

I really don't need a lot of fancy features. It just needs to be able to crawl my web site and return great (even decent!) search results. I don't need any crazy search operators. It doesn't need to index off my primary domain. It just needs to work!

Thanks, Hive Mind!