Does any body here know of a good search engine portal script? Preferably in php, I need a free one, because unfortunately I am broke.

It's not in PHP, but if you want to build a big web index there's always Apache Nutch+Lucene

http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/

If you're building something small (which, without any context, I'm guessing you are), you can probably just load it into a MySQL database and use their full text search & indexing. see:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...xt-search.html

phpdig

Never used but looks good:

Sphider - http://www.sphider.eu/