On the SpinDrop blog today, Dave Dash continues his look at the Lucene search engine for the Zend Framework with this new post showing how to boost certain terms' relevance in the search results.

Lucene supports boosting or weighting terms. For example, if I search for members of a web site, and I type in Dash, I want people with the name Dash to take precedence over somebody who has a hobby of running the 50-yard Dash.

He shows how to, with the help of a few simple lines of PHP code added to your application, you can easily boost terms based on field by whatever multiplier you choose.

In his latest post, Ilia Alshanetsky shares a handy (and a little scary) tip on finding the location of a phpinfo page reliably to help figure out the common PHP settings developers out there are using.

The problem with finding a reliable pool of such pages is that basic search often contaisn many blog, forum, bugs.php.net and alike entries which area copy & paste outputs from users. This maybe fine in some instances, but what if you just want the real phpinfo() pages. The answer is surprisingly simple.

His solution? To search for an element always in the page, but unique to it - usually the term you're looking for (like his suggestion of "Zend Scripting Language Engine"). He links to two result sets, one from Google and the other from Yahoo.

Besides the phpinfo information, Ilia also mentions the other handy data you can find with similar searches to major search engines like Apache header information.