''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 Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the ...

and is the inspiration of several search engines. StrangeSearch is written in C#,

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

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

web browser A web browser is application software 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 screen. Browsers are used o ...

for searching. StrangeSearch is licensed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. This project is no longer actively maintained.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 data ...

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 ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

-based, developed at the University of Missouri–Rolla, also available on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

. 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