cattaSearch
- website search engine
Open source local website crawl, find, index and search
Why and what?
You want to enable search functionality on your website, but you do not want to use a tech giant's "free" solution. Then cattaSearch is a free (without quotes) open source alternative.
With cattaSearch you get a complete backend solution as well as code snippets for your frontend website.
cattaSearch is based on a MySQL database and a webserver with PHP, ref. the requirements. Plus a number of free packages which are all included in the cattaSearch download file.
cattaSearch has been developed to avoid using Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE). CSE is "free", ie you don't have to pay money for using it. The only price seems to be a number of Google adds as the first search results. Fair? For some: Yes.
For others: No. First: Why show other's adds on your website, every time a search on your website is done? Furthermore, why contribute to a tech giant's raw material in the form of data about your website as well as its use and users? Data which the tech giant sells to everybody interested in and capabable of paying for it. Data which can be used in political campaigns you strongly oppose and dislike.
If you want to learn more about this, I recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
cattaSearch provides a complete backend solution for your website search, ie the functions for establishing the foundation for searching the website.
cattaSearch crawls your website, finds all your web pages, extracts the text from the pages and stores the data in your database.
The search on this website uses cattaSearch. Here you can see an example of cattaSearch in use. Just click the search icon in the menu on top.
cattaSearch includes code snippets, ie pieces of code, you can use and include on your website.