''StrangeSearch'' is a free, open-source indexing and search engine for Windows by Jeremy Davis and Dan Dunham. It was originally developed at Iowa State University and is the inspiration of several search engines. StrangeSearch is written in C#, C++ and

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

. It has native Windows user interface for administration and is accessed through a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

for searching. StrangeSearch is licensed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. This project is no longer actively maintained.

Features

StrangeSearch has the ability to index the files shared by a large number of computers on a network via

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

or SMB ( Windows file sharing). It also has a basic web interface pre-built in

to allow for searching and ranking of the top shares.

Projects inspired by StrangeSearch

Many of these projects use the same StrangeSearch code, but some use(d) their own software. * Weirdsearch (Reimplementation in straight C by a bored coder- much faster.) * Pantssearch (Used StrangeSearch code with several UI enhancements.) * landex (Arguably better than StrangeSearch in terms of features; uses its own code.) * fseek * Seek42 (

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based, developed at the University of Missouri–Rolla, also available on SourceForge. Now maintained by one of the authors of the now defunct Seekant.)

External links

{{Portal, Free and open-source software
''StrangeSearch'' HomepageSourceForge ''StrangeSearch'' Project PageSimilar Search Engine AnyTXT Searcher
Free search engine software Iowa State University