[icker32]

I would really appreciate any information people can give me about creating an online searchable database. It would be really great if said system could have data input by those viewing the website. Can this be done with any webhosting company, or do you have to use a particular one? Does it take huge amounts of storage or bandwidth? Sorry but im completley ignorant about making webpages. Maybe point me to some sort of guide?

edit: oh yeah, by searchable i mean have some sort of spreadsheet with different parameters that could be searched through

[cperrywebrat]

Are you speaking about searching your own site like this: http://bdch.com/search.asp or searching the internet like at google.com? Or do you mean actually search a database such as this? http://bdch.com/Doctors/default.asp?ID=find. A database can only be searched on what is in the database, not necessarily what is on your site, unless you create the database with every key word imaginable which appears on your site. Can you be a little more specific? Maybe provide a link to a website which does what you want it to do?

[icker32]

I need to find some way to create a website on which the user can search for their specifications in different categories(or choose to leave one blank)
Preferably some sort of software(that doesnt cost and arm and a leg) that could help me out because I dont know anysort of programming code.

This is sort of what I'm looking for. Users can specify different factors, in this case Age, Purpose, Location, etc
http://browseusers.myspace.com/Browse/Browse.aspx?z=1

I would like the results of the search to be listed in a ebay like form, where you can reorder them according to each of the columns.

I also need a way to allow users to input entries themselves(preferably with some sort of email verification) or atleast send data via email to myself in a format that would be easy to input into the online database.

[cperrywebrat]

I doubt there is something free out there as advanced as that page. You should consider learning programming or hiring one. I'm sure a number of us here would be willing to do this for you for a price

[drdrew1469]

I did this a while back. If by 'data input' you mean selectable criteria, then the page shows results relevant to what the user selected, then this is not costly at all and very do-able. I don't want to plug my company's site so I'll pm it to you as an example (and you to cperrywebrat ).

hth,

drew

[cperrywebrat]

I have one written with selectable criteria. On the intranet (internal to the hospital) - I wrote an incident (safety reports) program. I created an admin page to query the database with approximately 20 input fields of data to search on. It took me several weeks to program, but of course I do not have a coworker to share this work with . I thought it was a real pain, but it sure works slick.