I was wondering if anyone had any links pointing to information on search engine design. I am not talking about the ranking algorithms ( e.g. google - page rank ) I am more concerned with the mechanics.

A good example is the search engine that powers this site. It handles the search form, stores meta information about your search ( e.g.: "Ten Most Recent Searches at LinuxQuestions.org" ), puts up a page saying that your search is in progress and then uses a "<meta>" redirect to forward you to your results. I think that the results are stateful, so I can view the first 25 records and then hit next page and see the next 25 results w.o having to redo the search. So I am looking for information on how to impliment these kinds of fetures.

I have been googleing non-stop for like an hour w/ mixed results, any Ideas?

Thanks cludwin

I guess my next step is looking through some code in some Open Source Bulletin Boards and Search Engines...

Well, as most of these boards are DB-powered (usually some form of SQL-based database), you simply use the DB queries to do the searching for you in most cases. Then you just parse the results.

But don't confuse forum searches with search engines, because forum searches are basically just DB query frontends.

No confusion here,
I am looking for more than just a form handling script to execute a SQL statement, I think I am going to look into text-file cahing because It would be competely in efficient to search a 10,000 record database every time you wanted to grab the next 25 matches.

Well, any database worth anything has its own caching routines. If you're using a database, you shouldn't really try to build on top of it what ought to be built INTO it. If you're doing very specific things (whatever that "next 25 matches" thing you are referring to sounds like a candidate), then that's all well and good, but you'll need to pass along more details for help on those