I’m a big fan of PHP. While some people think its a beginners language or that you can’t acheive what you can with other, so-called advanced languages, I really beleive they are wrong. One of the evidence that proves my statement is what Nathan Enns, a good friend and the owner of search engine FyberSearch has come up with using of course, the language that some people think isn’t cool enough for them: PHP.
What is it? It’s GhetoSearch. The name probably explains it all, it’s a tool Enns has built which reverses the results’ order (in other words the algorithm) to show the most irrelevent results first (e.g. what would traditionally be on the last page) and the relevant results last. As Nathan points out, you can’t do this with traditional search engines. They might give you 144 million results for a topic, but you can only see the first thousand and nothing more. Try it for yourself: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves.
Ah ha! While the other are debugging, compiling, and whatever one does with a C++ or C or Java based architecture, Nathan shows off the flexibility of not only FyberSearch but the whole PHP language itself by coming up with something that would be impossible to in other engines.
But, being the pesimistic ‘get out of here’ kind of a guy, let’s say I don’t buy that. I wanna test it out. I mean, for all I know Nathan might’ve just changed the order from ‘relevant’ to ‘random’. So I test it out. What I end up with? You’ll see. Here is the last page (very last page, can’t go further) for a simple search for ‘rss’ in the FyberSearch GhetoSearch. Compare that to the first page for the same term but in the traditional FyberSearch results. So if Nathan is right, most of the results should be reversed, the so the very first result in the traditional should be very last in Gheto, and so on. Does it end up that way? Here:
Result 1 – Yes
Result 2 – Yes
Result 3 – Yes
Result 4 – Yes
Result 5 – Yes
Result 6 – Yes
Result 7 – Yes
Result 8 – Yes
Result 9 – Yes
Result 10 – Yes
Ok, so GhetoSearch is no joke. PHP is awesome. Google & others can’t do this even if they wanted to. FyberSearch is flexible. Nathan Enns is smarter than me 
.
Disclaimer:The ‘PHP is better, C++ and others suck’ was just said for fun. Even though to a certain extent I did mean it, I didn’t fully mean it. There are some things, probably many things you can’t do with PHP that you can with C and vice verca. I do respect both languages equally however I prefer to use PHP because I don’t understand any of C.
