I've always fancied myself as a bit of a web developer, but that's really just to say that I have no talent as a designer. Truth be told, I'm fairly clueless about development. I can do plain ole' CGI in Perl, and I've written a few patches for LJ, but that's about it.
I need some advice on a search solution for a particular problem on my site. Here's the problem:
I have somewhere between 300 to 500 old e-mails from a mailing list that I need to archive, with an average size of about 4 kb each, and a maximum size of around 10 kb. Together, I imagine they'll add up to about 3 megs. What I want is full text search capability. Ideally, the user should be able to query the sender, subject, body, and date fields separately, but I would settle for just a basic full text search, at least starting out.
This will probably be a static data set, and should only have to be indexed once. The list now has an automated archiver, and all I need to archive are the messages predating the archiver. I might someday set up my own archiver, as I'm not too pleased with the search capabilities of the present one, but for the time being, I just want something to index these old messages.
I'm on a shared hosting virtual server, and I'm not sure how much access I have to install my own stuff. I know that I have CGI, Perl, Python, PHP, JSP, MySQL, and most of the other standard stuff.
I want something simple, efficient, and fairly powerful. It needs to be open source.
If I want something to search multiple fields, that suggests to me a database. I've worked a little with MySQL, and could probably figure something out with it; though I'd rather not go to the trouble if something else would work just as well. I was reading today that MySQL's FULLTEXT is pretty inefficient, though it probably wouldn't make much of a difference for such a small application.
I've been reading some stuff on searchtools.com, and I see that there are quite a few tools out there. I don't have a clue which ones would be best for my purposes. That's why I'm here. I suppose that there will probably be as many opinions as there are people here, but I'm open to any suggestions.
