A client needed a search function for his site. Since it’s not a WordPress site (yet!), the options had to be reviewed. We settled on using a stand-alone script for adding a search function to the site. Could have used the simple Google search that you see everywhere, but we didn’t want to see the big G on this particular site.
Perlfect Search is an open source solution that was easy to upload, install and configure. Except for one small detail.
A dreaded 500 Internal Server Error appeared upon running a search for the first time. Aaack! It took a while to find the problem and my web host came to the rescue. The first line in the search script and indexer script both had a trailing slash and that made the files ‘not found’ on this particular web host.
The first line of the perl scripts at my host (your host or server may have things set up differently) should be this:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
not this:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl/ -w
Check the Perlfect FAQs for more help. The README file that comes in the script zip package will help immensely for installing and indexing via SSH.