Adding a local search engine to your website not only serves your visitors: it will provide you with a tremendous amount of precious data. You will learn about what your visitors are looking for, how do they search for it, the most popular searches, etc. You can then put this data to your service by optimizing your pages, writing new content, etc.

I used to use phpDig a lot but since it hasn’t been updated since 2005, so I need to find an alternative. I’ve found out about Sphider, a free PHP crawler, so we’re going to try it out today.

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