Hello, I have a bunch of plain text files that are in webroot/docs. Can anyone suggest a search engine that is easy to implement that can search for words that are in the text files in a specific directory and return results?

Honestly when I search google, I only come up with Sphider, which I have not been successful with implementing, seems it has a bunch of problems. I also find Sphider derivatives that cost money.

I also tried something called SSEP and for some reason I can't get it to index my text files. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Hi

You may try htdig
See this howto to help you configure it to your needs.

Regards

grep and cat

grep, there should be lots of examples but in its simplest form

grep "text to search for" /path/to/files/*

Hello

If it's lots of text and you want the search to be fast, you need something that will index all of it. You will also get a lot of other features, and better sorting of the results.

One such system is htdig, another is Apache Lucene.

https://lucene.apache.org/core/

How are you wanting these results returned? Are you offering the results on the web through through Apache? Seeing how you're already using LAMP, it wouldn't take much to write a custom script in PHP that could easily do that searching for you and then spit out a webpage with results.