Bot News
ASPseek

By Brian Proffitt

Building your own search engine, whether it be for a local site or for the entire Internet, can be a daunting task. After all, the trick is not to build a search bot that hits every Web page--that's easy. To do so efficiently--that's hard.

With the growing popularity of open source software, it should come as little surprise that there is a project underway that can help you jumpstart the building of your own search engine.

Called ASPseek, this search engine developed by SWsoft is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). This means that the search engine and its source code are freely available for anyone to acquire and manipulate to their own specifications.

ASPseek is actually comprosed of more than just an indexing bot. Written in C++ and utilizing a STL library and SQL server, ASPseek is made up of an indexing robot, a search daemon, and a CGI search front-end.

According to the project's Web site, "ASPSeek is optimized for multiple sites and medium loads, and can be used to search within several million pages (URLs)."

Looking at the online demo of ASPseek, it seems to be a fair search engine. Results are displayed in a nicely formatted manner, though expected results were a little on the lean side. The engine proclaims that it searches through pages connected to application service providers' Web sites.

But, by being able to access the source code, developers can easily modify ASPseek to meet their own specifications. ASPseek has a large number of features built-in as well, which will give developers a definite head start.

Since ASPseek is under the GPL, developers will also gain the benefit of future collaborative efforts, as all results of code modifcation in an open-source environment are shared with other developers.