Tips and Tricks

Adding a Search Engine Feature to a Website

Improve your website navigation

By Catalin Bocanu, Web News Editor

7th of September 2007, 14:27 GMT

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When you have a large website, composed of many pages it is time to include a search option for your visitors inside your web pages. Because a lot of pages are more information to your site visitors, the adding of a search facility will induce an interactive browsing experience and as a consequence, they will be pleased to stay longer on your web

space.

The main advantage of an internal search engine is that it allows anyone to find certain information quickly and also to retrieve complementary or related content. The search engine indexes your website content, then the various search operations will be performed from a simple html form that must be embedded in every page of your website. You have many options to add a search engine to your website. If you have CGI access on your server, then you could use Perl search engine scripts (there are many of them available for free).

Another alternative would be PHP or Javascript search engine scripts. There is also the possibility to include only one page search by using an appropriate javascript. This is recommended for small websites. If your web site is driven by a content management system (CMS), then you will automatically have a search option on your website in most of the cases or you can add it with a few lines of code. The internal site search can be also performed by many well-known web search engines. You can add also to your site the "web search" option. Many of the major search engines provide this service for your website. You just copy and paste a simple code in your webpages, then your visitors will be able to perform web searches from within your website.

You can also choose a free indexing service, but you should be aware of the indexing periodicity. If your site content changes frequently it is recommended to use a search engine script on your web server. In case your website is hosted on a Windows Server you can select as a search facility the alternative offered by Index Server along with Internet Information Services. Site search and web search are very important features that assure your web site accessibility and improve the overall website navigation simplifying the menu structures and giving visitors an insight on the existing nature of the information.

TAGS:

search engine | internal site search | site search | search facility | site indexing

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