Drupal Modules

Almost Awsome

First off this is a huge improvement over the core search functionality which is pretty useless if search is a big part of your website.

Pros.
Much more accurate than core search
doesn't require you to run a Solr server
works on pretty much any shared hosting
easy to set up
Cons.
Doesn't migrate smoothly*
Doesn't allow you to set minimum word length**(fixed in new beta)
could use more customizations on the settings pretty basic (but it works well yes that is a pro again)

**Core search allows minimum word size I actually feel this feature is important for my site*** and I'm sure many others. There are are tons of pretty much useless words under 3 letters that I don't want searched (e.g. i am me we etc.). This is totally not there if an artical is titled "i am i because i love and i will die" and another is "I love cars" and a person searches "I love" its going to pull up the article that has a bunch of "i"s in it above the one that is more relevant because it will register the 4 "i"s and the two matches "I love". this works great for real words not for i me my and all that jazz.

Update 10-30-09: The currently beta v2 adds this feature along with the ability to ban words and some other great new features.

*Migration Bug. So you install the thing on your local host and it solves your search dilemma and your search has been replaced with a definitely functional solution. For the most part plug and play easy beautiful and doesn't use need all the stuff that doesn't work on my shared hosting nice looking good! Upload to the web and 5 hours later your still there trying to figure out why it is returning the same random results for every search wipe index nope wtf. Finally after blood sweat and tears... dissable, uninstall, enable, put settings back, rerun cron, booya it works I don't even know if it's cause I'm lucky or not? That's the point off reliability why did it not work and what about uninstalling it fixed it? I'm just going to assume that there where settings based off the doc root in my local host and the uninstalling it started fresh.

Update 10-30-09: So the problem was that I moved the module and database entries but the file system that the module creates I left. The fix I suggested will work every time. If you are truly migrating from one server to another (not just part of the site like me) than you will not hit this issue.

Conclusion: It's a huge improvement over core search and better than Google Custom Search and trip search (drupal 5 only). Definitely a must for those of you like me on shared hosting that won't let them set up Apache Solr Search.

*** My site running Lucene Search: http://asktheswami.com

Review by nickeberle [info] on November 25, 2009 - 19:01