Sphider - A PHP search engine

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Frequently asked questions

Why arent some of my links picked up?

There can be a few reasons this.

• By default, Sphider only picks up links which are in the same domain, and in the same directory as the intial page. So if you index domain.com, it will not follow download.domain.com. What to do: Check the "Spider can leave domain option" in indexing options to allow Sphider to leave the initial domain.
• Your links are in flash or javascript. Sphider can only pick up links in Javascript if the are entered as literal strings (not via a variable or similar). What to do: You can either modify your page to include normal html links, or make a page where all the links of your site are present.
• Your site is malformed. Somethimes it can happen that although the browser will show the page, you have misplaced a tag in a way the PHP's built-in strip_tags function removes some part of the page. Check your page W3C HTML-Validator.

I search for someword but the search engine reports that the word is "too short or common" and returns no results.

There can be two reasons for this. Either the word is shorter than the minimum word length specified in Sphider settings, or the word is in common.txt file and thus ignored. In either case if you modify the setting or remove the word from the list, you have to do a full reindex to be able to search that word.

I receive a "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of xx seconds exceeded in ...." or a "Warning: set_time_limit() has been disabled for security reasons" message after starting indexing.

This means that PHP is running in safe mode in your server. You need to turn off PHP safe mode in order for Sphider to work properly. See http://www.php.net/features.safe-mode on how to do this.

I receive a "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xx bytes exhausted (tried to allocate yy bytes) in ..." message while indexing.

This means that you have a maximum memory limit set in your PHP settings, and Sphider has run into this limit. You need to increase the memory available. In php.ini, find "memory_limit = xx" and change it to a bigger value

I want to exclude a forum/some part of the site from being indexed in my site. How can i do this?

Check the documentation.

I want to index pages which are accessed via forms.

Sphider cannot access pages via forms. You need to have a html links to pages you want to index.