My coffee site INeedCoffee needed a better search engine. I had thrown some basic SQL together when the site was launched back in 1999. It did an OK job when the site didn’t have much content. Over the years, the quality of the search results got worse and worse. So I did what any coder would do, I looked for a free solution.

 

Google did better job searching my site than my own code, so I looked at their Google Custom Search solution. I didn’t like their free ad version and I didn’t what to pay them $100 each and every year for the non-ad version. I decided that not only could I write my own search engine that was just as fast, but I could also deliver better results to the users. After all, I knew my content better than anyone else.

 

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