On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website today, there's a new article that compares searching methods on a site - a "search engine showdown".

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.

The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:

• Sphider
• MnogoSearch
• TSEP
• PHPDig
• iSearch
• RiSearch

PHP as been bumped down a spot in the popularity ranking provided by Tiobe Software for this month. It was pushed down to fifth place by Visual Basic moving up the ranks. The others in the top five are (in order) Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic.

The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their long term trends graph, PHP has still been gaining popularity overall, with only a bit of a dip lately. Other languages in the top five are also currently seeing similar dips in popularity too. Check out the full report for all of this month's details.

Jim Plush has two big announcements on his blog today - both dealing with his MyBic Ajax and PHP framework. One deals with a new version and the other with a benchmark the library has reached.

The first announcement is about the package's latest release - version 0.7.0. This is the last release before heading straight up to a 1.0 stable release for the utility. This current version contains no bugs/memory leaks that he's found. This release was made to fix the last of them.

Right on the heels of this announcement, there's another concerning the MyBic library's placement on the SourceForge ranking list. It's been officially bumped up to number 145 out of the 100,000+ projects the site manages.

You can get the latest on this great package and all of the information and downloads of the new releases from the project's official site.

As PHP Magazine notes today, PHP has come in fifth (again) on the TIOBE Programming Community index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.

On the SearchOpenSource.com site today, there's this new article combining two popular things together to make one powerful and productive tool using the Amazon web services and the Zend Framework.

Web frameworks have been all the rage lately, and for good reason. They eliminate a great deal of the mindless repetition involved in creating Web applications large and small.

Spurred on by the enormous success of Rails, PHP developers have been hard at work creating a number of framework solutions. Notable efforts include Cake, Symfony, and, more recently, the Zend Framework.

They start with the output of the scripts, two tables worth of data - a list of the sales rank and the details on a specific book. Then it's on to the good stuff - the creation of the controller to connect to Amazon, the views to output the data, and the method to make the request and populate the database.

Sitepoint, widely known for quality in content and tutorials, has a new post on its Site Marketing blog today dealing with tracking a site's Google ranking with the help of the Google API and the PEAR SOAP package.

Bernard Peh, the author, sets up what the Google API is and includes the way to grab your own API key (your pass into the powerful Google backend). The other two requirements for the project are the PEAR SOAP package and an install of at least PHP 4 or higher.

There's a list of input parameters for the functionality, with each described for what it does, and pley of code to help you integrate them into the API call. They give the example of the class grabbing the needed info (via SOAP), parsing out your URL from those results, and a simple form to make checking different URLs all the simpler.

From the NewsForge site, there's this new tutorial that shares how you can develop some simple PHP scripts and, with the help of SQLite, "exploit" the Amazone Web Services.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me how my book, Pro OpenSSH, was selling on Amazon.com. I was tracking the sales by going to Amazon.com and viewing the book page to examine the sales rank. The only data displayed about history information was today's Sales Rank and Yesterday's Sales Rank, which isn't all that helpful. I decided to use PHP, SQLite, and the Amazon Web Services API to gather more useful data.

I thought it would be fun to track the sales rank over a period of time, then display a graph of the sales rank over time on a Web page.

He shows how, via the REST web service Amazon offers, he created a simple PHP5 script to grab the resulting XML, parse out the sales rank for his book, and drop it into a SQLite database. He chooses to go with the SimpleXML package for the parsing.

All of the code is laid out in the tutorial, including some to use the Image::Graph package in PEAR to render a simple line graph of the fetched information.

[digg it]

According to this new post on Chris Shiflett's blog today, his book (and its corresponding site) - Essential PHP Security - was Slashdotted yesterday.

Thanks to everyone who wrote to let me know that Essential PHP Security was Slashdotted yesterday. Slashdot still amazes me. I think the book's Amazon.com Sales Rank is a testament to the power of Slashdot.

He notes that the book has been very well recieved (at #354 in the Books section on Amazon) and has garnered some great reviews as well. It's great to see that the community is snatching up this great resource. It can only help to further the cause of enhanced security in PHP applications overall.