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Site-Search-Pro Rip-Off

Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 9:55 am
by davidtube
Hi. A few months ago I bought and installed Site-Search-Pro as an internal search engine for my website for $300. I have found that its spider only turned up around 4 pages of my 600+ page dynamic website. I've tried contacting support 7 times by email over the last two months and by phone but the phone number provided seems to not be in use. I had one reply to my emails, and sorted the issue they suggested but that didn't fix it and I have since been ignored. Their support page claims to be

"24/7

Your 100% satisfaction is our principal goal!

Our support center usually replies within 12 hours."

Well there's been 60 sets of those 12 hours since I last heard from them. Has anyone got any suggestions of what I could do?

Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:01 am
by John Cartwright
Google allows you to incorporate their search bar and results directly into your site.. nearly guaranteed to be far more powerful than these search engines in a box software. You can even earn revenue doing from google displaying ads based on the search term.

If I were you I'd cut my loses and shift to google search.

EDIT | Before I purchase software from someone that I do not trust, it doesn't hurt to fire them an email or call them prior to see how fast and accurate their service claims are.

Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 1:25 pm
by davidtube
That's a good idea. I looked into Google custom search before but thought I wanted something I could customize more to fit in with my site and google hadn't indexed my site back then so it wouldn't work, but i suppose it will work now.

Thanks for the idea, I'll probably go with it.

Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 4:11 pm
by alex.barylski
It looks like the same brand of software as this:

http://www.mailing-manager.com/

Ironically, I considered buying their newsletter solution but then decided to development my own.

I would suggest filling a complaint with the BBB (Better Business Bureau). Blog about it and make AS MUCH negative noise as you can generate. If they don't refund your money, make them pay for it even more by giving them a bad name. The $300 you loose is shadow in comparison to the thousands they'll loose in lost business and money required to improve or (hopefully replace) their own brand identity.

I've been bite once (a few years back) by company that claimed 100% satisfaction and/or money back...

The only way to deal with these types is to bad mouth them. Bad press is horrible for business.

Alternatively you could look into phpDig to index your web site.

Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 12:53 pm
by Jonah Bron
I've been contemplating an indexer for the past month. I was thinking something like the way the google bot works. Maybe something like this? (untested)

Code: Select all

$startfile = "startfile.html";
function run_index($file){
if (file_exists($file)){
  $fcontents = file_get_contents($file);
  $fcontents = strip_tags($fcontents, '<a>');
  $fcontents = explode('<a href="', $fcontents);
  foreach ($fcontents as $fcontent){
    $fcontent = explode('"', $content);
  }
  //I'm not sure from here.  This breaks the contents up into: [0] would be erased, [1][0] would be the first link, [2][0] would be the second, etc.  For each link, check if it includes the string "http://", to make sure we aren't indexing the entire internet.  Then, if the address is not already in the index, add it, and index it (by running run_index('file')).  But if it is already in the index, then add one to it's rating number (for the ranking in the search results).  Will it work?  I don't know.
}