Charter,
Thank you for your kind comments!!!
Your first point indicates to me that I may need to watch where I make assumptions in my future tutorials and where comments are necessary. By default, NetObjects Fusion places all but the index page in a /html/ directory. This is where NetObjects Fusion would place our search.php that is created in the tutorial. The reason that I used "../spider" is because the search.php exists in a sibling directory to spider: /html. This is something of a hack on my part, but I was trying to keep the implementation as clean, simple, and timely as possible for both tools.
I will update the tutorial to reflect the points you mentioned. PhpDig is a fine application, and I believe that the NetObjects community will benefit greatly from it's use.
Many NetObjects deployments are small businesses who may not know that there are alternatives to commercial 3rd party services. I want to make sure that I do my part to help empower and expose the masses to the Open Source community.
Thank you again for your kind comments.