The Importance of Website Search

The paradigm of the search engine is the glue by which the modern internet works. If you need to find any information about a website then you will go to a search engine (probably Google, judging by the search statistics) and you will enter your search terms and find a list of sites that you might be interested in. This is the kind of functionality that visitors expect to find whether they are performing a general web search or whether they are looking for something specific on an individual website.

If you're serious about your website then you will need to provide some kind of search functionality for your site. This both provides your visitors with a sense of professionalism about your site. It also gives them a way to find things that are present on your site but which may not be immediately obvious. You are also providing your visitors with a means of navigating your site that's completely and entirely familiar to them. After all it's how the web works in general.

Google provides this kind of search functionality which you can use on your site via their Adsense program. This is free to join and you can use the Google Adsense button on the left-hand panel of this Blog to join. However, there is one major disadvantage to using Google as your site's search mechanism. Though the system is free (and you don't have to store potentially large indexes on your site) it does rely on Google having indexed your entire site. If you're a new site or you have very few back-links to your site then it's becoming increasingly difficult to enter google's indexes and very few of your pages may be indexed by Google. As a result Google's search system may be of little or no use to you.

Personally I've eschewed Google's site index search system for the very reasons detailed above (though I do include Google web searching tools on my site). Instead I use the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine to power searches on my site. This is a Perl-based system that you can either install for free (or you can pay $40 for a license that gives you slightly more functionality).

This is an impressive system which you can easily download and install (as long as you can execute CGI scripts on your server). It allows you to define your search results page as you want as well as allowing you to decide which pages you want to index and which ones you want to omit. This way you can index anything you want from your site (or your can omit 90% of your site from the index if you want). Moreover, once you've installed the scripts on your site you can use a standard web browser to call the script and execute it, making running the indexing of your site very easy and flexible. The system is very quick as well, both in terms of indexing your site and in terms of the searches you can perform. Even better, you can also specify ads that you want to place on your search results.

The basic search functionality is provided by a search box of the type that you can find on my home page. However, if you want a very simple search box that you can place anywhere then all you need to do is modify the form below to use on your own site:

<form method="get" action="http://my_site_url/cgi-bin/search/search.pl" style="margin:1px;">
<input type="hidden" name="Match" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="Realm" value="All" />
<input type="text" name="Terms" value="search site" onfocus="clearform(this);" style="width:100px;" />
<br style="line-height:2px;" />
<input type="submit" value="Site Search" />
</form>

As the Perl script is usually in the cgi-bin directory simply change my_site_url to the URL of your own website. (Depending on your configuration you may have to name search.pl to search.cgi. IF you want to see how this simple site search box looks and behaves then have a look at my recipe site search function.

Adding search functionality to your site is something easy to do and you can do it with a tool that's completely free and which is under your own control. Don't neglect this important functionality as it's an essential part of making your site both look and feel professional.