Search Function - Special (accented) Characters?

[lynkali]

Having recently redesigned my site, I added the EntropySearch box on some of the pages where I thought it would be useful, especially on my 404 page. As much as I like the idea, I'm not entirely happy with the results, and I was wondering if anyone had any insight or suggestions (modification or installing a different CGI search function) that might solve these problems:

 

(1) I have a lot of pages in German, with special characters (e.g. umlauts or ß). When I search on Präpositionen, it should return about 20 results, but it says 0. Is this because I'm on a Mac and it's not transliterating to HTML characters correctly, or can EntropySearch not handle high-end ascii? Either way, I would really like to find a search function that can return correct results when searching with special characters.

 

(2) EntropySearch seems to fail if more than a certain number of characters are searched on. I haven't quite tracked the problem down, but an example: I have several pages with the title "Kein Schwein ruft mich an". If I search on any of the first four words, alone or in succession ("kein schwein ruft mich"), I get the correct results. But if I search on the entire phrase ("kein schwein ruft mich an") I get 0 results! Yikes. Obvioulsy visitors looking for that phrase (it's a song title and I actually get a lot of hits for it from Google) are going to be unhappy. Similarly, searching on "Lenz der Hofmeister" returns 0 results, even though I have a handful of pages that talk about "Lenz" and "der Hofmeister" together. Is EntropySearch that restrictive?

 

(3) Since numbers (1) and (2) seem to be inherent to EntropySearch, can anyone suggest a different CGI search function that I could install? I know next to nothing about scripting, having just copied bits of PHP here and there, and I've never done anything with Perl, but I think I could figure out a basic installed module if it comes with documentation. I wouldn't even mind paying a small amount if it's really worthwhile. I've seen mention of PSLightningSearch, but reading their User Guide I can't tell whether there will be any problems with German umlauted letters, since it doesn't seem to talk about any special character issues.

 

Subdomain searching isn't a problem for me either way (I have a subdomain but don't use it for anything important), so that's not a criterion that matters to me. Customizing results would be nice, but as long as (1) and (2) above are solved, I'd be happy with almost any design.

 

I'd rather not go with a Google search, although many of my pages are Google-indexed, I'm adding new stuff all the time and would like a search function that doesn't rely on Google or other offsite indexers.

 

Any help would be appreciated!

[TCH-Bruce]

Don't know of any off the top of my head, I use Atomz myself.

 

But a quick search at Hotscripts.com turned up a bunch. Here's the link.

 

http://www.hotscripts.com/CGI_and_Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/Searching/Site_Search/index.html