I have been researching search tools for our Intranet/enterprise, after looking at Nutch, MS search server 2010 (express) and plenty of others I decided to write my own, why? A fair question, basically they all had something not quite right about them, varying from rubbish web-front ends to an inability to authenticate with NTLM or go through proxies. Lastly, I thought it would be fun!

The result - I’m almost done, 3 hours of coding! I didn’t start from scratch though, I wrote a simple ruby crawler, wired it to Apache Solr and wrote a rails application to call out to Solr and display the results (no rails database involved - Which differs from the normal RoR and Solr configuration). The RoR application even supports open-search.

The result is excellent! Just fine tuning now and tidying, I will put the code up in a day or two - It will be instructive if nothing else…

[The code is now on Github: https://github.com/mangled/Poodle]