Q:

MVC site search functionality

i need a simple site search functionality for my mvc app.  some of the pages are static and some dynamic (like news articles that are entered in cms).  I would like the search to handle both.  is this product any good?  http://www.sitesearchasp.net any other? 

A:

@stephbu - Thank you for the mention. 
If you choose to use arachnode.net, you have the choice of either Lucene. NET or SQL Full-text Indexing. 
There are some 'head-scratchers' with Lucene. NET, especially when establishing concurrent read/write/search scenarios, but as a static reflection of content it works very well. 
If you want something that is free, and turn-key, try Solr(.Net) or Microsoft Search Server. 
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/en/us/search-server-express.aspx (this was free last I looked at it...)
Thanks! 
Mike

A:

Resist buying anything if you can - there are many free .NET based search engines out there.   Favourite of choice would be Lucene.net, decent tutorial here:

Lucene Tutorial

It's fairly simple to setup, you control what data is indexed through the Lucene API.  There are open-source spidering extensions like Arachnode out there if you need crawling.   Its mighty powerful for indexing catalogues etc. 
Guess it depends how important search is for your business relative to the cost of owning a search engine.   Buying one will probably give you turn-key functionality, but no doubt will run to the same cost of integration if you want more advanced features. 

A:

You could also consider using Solr, which is a search engine Web service that sits on top of Lucene, and provides extra features such as hit-highlighting and faceted searching.  .NET integration is available through the SolrNet library.  Both Solr and SolrNet are free. 
By using SolrNet you can easily index your database content.  I use NHibernate for database access, and SolrNet also has NHibernate integration, so documents get automatically re-indexed when the content changes.  You could easily set up a similar arrangement for your database access method of choice. 
For the static pages, you could either submit the HTML programmatically or use a Web crawler (see this question for some suggestions).  I haven't needed to do this, so I can't make any recommendations on which tool to use.