How to Put a Site Search Engine On Your Website

There are three ways to add a site search to your website.

1. Installing Your Own Search Engine Script

The ideal way, in my opinion, is to install your own Perl search engine script or (if you prefer) PHP search engine script. This requires you to have CGI access (or PHP as the case may be) on your web account.You can get one of the numerous free search engine scripts and adapt it to your site. You can find a list of some free search engine Perl CGI scripts

 

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2. Using a Free or Commercial Third Party Search Engine Service

If installing a PHP or Perl CGI script is a problem, then you can use one of the many free or commercial search engine services. These services index your site for you and provide you with the HTML code to plug into your web pages. That's it. You have a working search engine for your site with little of the installation woes.

A list of Free Search Engine Remote Hosting Services

 

3. Using the Major Search Engines

You can actually use the major search engines like Google and Alta Vista as your site's search engine, free of charge.

To do this with Google, go to http://services.google.com/cobrand/free_select and complete the online form.

If you prefer to use Alta Vista, you will need to create a form modelled on the following code:

 <form method="get" 
action="http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query"> <input type="hidden" name="pg" 
value="q" /> <input type="hidden" name="text" value="yes" /> <input 
type="hidden" name="what" value="web" /> <input type="hidden" name="fmt" 
value="" /> <input type="text" name="q" value="%2Burl%3Awww.example.com 
" /> <input type="submit" value="Search" /> </form> 

Change "www.example.com" to your own domain name. To search your site with that form, you simply type your query after the "+url:www.example.com " (where "www.example.com" is replaced by your real domain) text that appears in the the search entry box, and hit the "Search" button. This will cause the query to be sent to Alta Vista's engine. If you put a "target" attribute in the form tag, you can even direct the results so that it appears in a frame with your site URL still showing.

This method has the following additional disadvantages:

• The re-indexing frequency of your site is even more limited than when using one of the CGI hosted services mentioned above. You have basically no control over the frequency that the major search engines index your site. This means that the search engines results will frequently be inaccurate - and if you add new pages to your site often, your site search engine will not be able to locate it.
• The results page has the search engine's advertisements and formatting. You have even less control over the output than when using the third party search engine remotely hosted services.