Keywording PDF's on a website and searching for PDFs internally by using a search engine

Question

So, I have been tasked to do several things on my work experience. There are currently PDFs uploaded on the company website. These are troubleshooting and technical/release documents are titled by the main topic of their focus (such as 'Building a Query'. However, these documents tend to mention or cover another topic along with the one primary to the document such as 'Running a Query'.

My tasks are:

1. Add keywords or tags to these PDFs that consist of the topics covered in each PDF.
2. Add some sort of search engine or similar utility from which a user could search for 'x' and see all the PDFs mentioning 'x'

I'm starting from the ground up, so any ideas are welcome.

Solution

If your starting from the ground up, Wordpress has lots of plugins available that will get you up and running quick...heres one for PDF search https://searchwp.com

While i have not used this plugin it seems to have the functionality you want.

If you are new to wordpress you got a little bit of a learning curve ahead, but there are plenty of resources out there and some great themes available from places like themeforest.net.

Hope that helps;)

Comments

[WebStudio]

With a bit of research you may even find a free search plugin, or a plugin that will search tags of your uploaded PDFs

[Will]

SearchWP is quite good. If WP is an option, definitely consider it. Even allows for weighting and synonym mapping (a search for 'toad' includes 'frog'). We use it on ecotrust.org and it indexes PDFs very well. There are some that it chokes on and I haven't had the time to sort out why but with hundreds of PDFs on the site and 5-10 not being indexed I've filed it under no-big-deal. It does allow you to add text to a particular PDF's meta data so that it might search that instead. Good stuff! PS. I don't work for them. :)