Search inside yourself

A fundamental truth, call it what you like, getting the right info in front of users as quickly as possible is the raison d’etre for a web site.

Three clicks (or less) and you’re there is what good web site navigation is all about. But there are times when, no matter the careful planning that has been expended, that this navigational adage cannot be fulfilled. Usually this is because there are so many layers to drill through, or user-proofness can only extend so far.

So give your web visitors what they want with an internal search of your site. Not only will it help visitors find what they are looking for, it’ll help stop them wandering off elsewhere.

Free site searches to check out appear below, but as usual there’s no free lunch online.

SiteLevel This is a neat solution that will search sites with up to 1000 pages. The downside is that the results are presented along with adverts over which you have no control.

Google Free – Register and you’re away. It’s also possible to customise to a certain degree to match the look and feel of your own site. So good so far. The catch is this site search service carries the rider from Google: “The free SiteSearch option is a sub-index of Google's main index. Updates are determined by Google and there is no guarantee of pages crawled.”

This means, in other words, that it may not work properly or be as comprehensive as you would hope. So before implementing the free site search, it would be worthwhile re-submitting your site to Google in order to ensure the results they hold in cache are as up to date as possible.

If neither of these options appeals, there are plenty of paid-for alternatives around.

Or you could try your hand at building your own search engine! Some programming knowledge is useful, but there are a host of forums and web sites that offer advice and guides on how to custom build a search engine from scratch. These include searchengineforums.com and webmasterworld.com

Links in this story

http://sitelevel.whatuseek.com/index.shtml

http://www.google.com/services/free.html

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum23/