Implementing a Search Box using ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, Entity Framework

Question

I have no experience building a search solution, but I'd like to have a search box within my solution and I don't know where to even begin. Are there cool SQL Server tricks that I can use to make my search solution performant (I'm using a hosted SQL 2008 server) I'd love pointers to a multi-step tutorial that starts me off with a simple query search solution...and then layers on more advanced code and features.

Answer 1

You don't actually say whether you need/want a 'spider' to index your site "as is" (like Google; which is useful if your searchable content on each page comes from many different tables/objects/entities) or whether you just want to query EF using full-text-search-like syntax to return a collection of Entities?

If you are interesting in the 'spider' approach - here's a CodeProject article for a small ASP.NET Search Engine "Searcharoo". It is a web-crawling search engine for small-ish sites (it doesn't use a database at all), so it may not be applicable for your situation. The code is also at searcharoo.codeplex.com and there are 7 articles on how it works/was built at Searcharoo.net (disclaimer: I wrote them; I hope they are interesting/useful).

If you need to search your database directly, you should probably look into SQL Server 2008's Full Text Search feature (assuming LIKE isn't sophisticated enough for your needs). We used info from this article (free registration) to set-up SQL Full Text Search on a work project... no EF in our solution though.

Also, as you might know StackOverflow is built with ASP.NET MVC - they blogged about some problems with SQL 2008 FTS. There's also some info on SQL FTS versus Lucene.NET (which is another search engine you could research) that might be useful.