Good site navigation is an essential means of making sure your viewers find what they want on your Web site. That’s pretty obvious stuff. The real questions are how much is it going to cost you, or your clients, and how much of your time is it going to take to implement such an arduous task. How’s free and about 10 minutes sound? Yeah, we thought you might be interested. In this article, we’ll first review the cases in which you should consider adding a search engine to your site and then show you how to prepare your site for indexing. Finally, we’ll skip you through the steps necessary to set up your own search engine.
Why Search When You Can Click?
Many people assume that good ol’ intuitive navigation will take the place of a search engine for their site, and in certain circumstances, this assumption is true. For instance, if your site only contains a paltry 10 or so pages, there’s no real reason to consider adding a search engine to it. After all, why include a search engine when a few clicks of the mouse can do the trick? Also, if your site is database driven, a search engine may not be for you either. But, if your site has a number of pages and doesn’t rely on a database to serve those pages, a search engine might be just what your site needs to take it to the next level of perfection.
Shifting Responsibility
Nah, we’re not implying that you stiff that lame assistant of yours for those broken links you added to your site last week (although you certainly should blame it on someone). Rather, we’re suggesting that there are two ways to set up a search engine for your site–local or remote. A local search engine requires that you have software on your server that you maintain, which performs the indexing and handles the requests. You’re responsible for its operation. A remote search engine, on the other hand, requires only that you set it up and occasionally monitor its status. While we’ve oversimplified this a bit, it’s pretty obvious that a remote search engine is easier to manage and, interestingly enough, that’s the type we’ll be discussing.
Making Sure Your Web Site’s Squeaky Clean
Once you’ve determined that a remote site is your best choice, it’s time to make sure your Web site will play nice with the search engine’s robot. That means going through and making sure you don’t have any dead links. Also, be sure that you have text links on the page the robots will be indexing rather than graphic links or JavaScript redirects.
In the past, we’ve shown you how to disallow robots to your site. Now you need to make sure they can access your site. That means a quick check of the robot.txt file on your server to ensure you haven’t disallowed any of the important pages.
Choosing Your Search Engine
Once you’ve determined that everything on your Web site is spit-polished, you’re ready to start shopping for those free search engines we spoke of earlier. Since there are several to choose from, it merits reviewing the options of each. And, since you’re paying big bucks for us to tell you these things, we’ve included a helpful table of the various features of each of the free search engines around. In Table A you’ll also notice that you just don’t get anything for free–they all add a little advertisement of some sort either for their service, or a third party. Regardless, the benefits of the search engines are well worth the price of a little ad here and there.
Table A: There are a number of companies that provide free search engines.
Because we’re into all things nuclear since we learned you can heat up your socks and undies in the microwave, we chose the company named Atomz.com to use for our search engine. While they may not be able to spell, they certainly do offer a very easy and feature-rich search engine service. Besides providing the same basics that the other folks offer, Atomz.com indexes Flash and PDF files, allows you to totally customize your results page, creates synonym searches, and has a chocolatey-nougat center. Further, you don’t have to include a huge graphic advertising their service–just a small link or cool little icon.
Starting the Reactor
To begin your journey into search engine enlightenment, you’ll first need to sign up for the service at www.atomz.com by clicking the Join Now! button. Then you just enter your email address and the URL of your Web site, as shown in Figure A. When you click the Join button, they’ll ask you to confirm your email address and then they’ll send you a password to the service.
Figure A: Atomz.com doesn’t require a lot of invasive information from you–just the facts.
Once you get your password, you need to invite the search robot to your site for a little tea and indexing. You do this by re-entering the name of the site, giving the site a name, and choosing a category that best fits your site. When you click the Next button, Atomz.com begins to index your site, as shown in Figure B. As you’ll notice from the example, the robot indexes not only words but synonyms and sound-alike words as well. The robot also indexes the page title, keyword meta tag, description meta tag, and the target meta tag. Given all the indexing going on, chances are slim that folks won’t be able to find something on your site. You can also exclude words from the indexing if you’d like so you don’t spend a lot of time indexing the words a, the, or and.
Figure B: It takes a surprisingly short time for Atomz.com to index your site.
Once the robot’s finished indexing your site, an icon labeled Click Here Now appears in the Next Status Update table cell. When you click it, Atomz.com takes you to the Index Overview page, where you can view the Index Log, update the index, or schedule automatic index updates.
Powering Up Your Site
Now that Atomz.com knows all there is to know about the contents of your site, you’re ready to add the search function to your site. To do so, click on the HTML tab at the top of the page to display the HTML Overview page. Here you’ll find that you have two options for your search, a standard or an advanced form, as shown in Figure C. To make it easy to add either of these forms to your site, they’ve even included the HTML code you’ll need. Listing A shows the code for the standard search form, which is what we decided to use for our example.
Figure C: You have two search forms to choose from.
Listing A: You can add this code to your Web page to display the standard search form.
<!– Atomz.com Search HTML for Derby Parrot Heads –>
<form method="get" action="https://search.atomz.com/search/">
<input size=15 name="sp-q"><br>
<input type=submit value="Search">
<input type=hidden name="sp-a" value="00081c22-sp00000000">
</form>
To test out the search engine before you add it to your page, simply enter a search in the text field in one of the search form previews and click the Search button. When you do, the search engine checks the index and displays the matching results, as shown in Figure D. Since our site is relatively small, the search only found one match. You’ll also see the small logo that we were talking about earlier. While you must have some mention of Atomz.com on your results page, you can at least choose from several different unobtrusive options.
Figure D: Atomz.com returns the request of your search almost immediately.
Speaking of Options
While beggars reportedly can’t be choosers, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with the standard results page that Atomz.com creates by default. In fact, you’ll find that they include seven different standard results templates to choose from, including one in XML that allows you to exchange the data of the results to another application. As if that weren’t enough, the site also includes instructions on creating your own template to exactly match the look and feel of your site. How’s that for cool?
Other Uses For a Search Engine
Okay, so you’re probably thinking that a search engine is simply a way for your viewers to find something on your site. Wrong! It’s a way for you to find out what your viewers are looking for on your site. Every single request a viewer makes is logged into the Atomz.com database for you to review later. The free reports include each word searched and the number of times it was searched, as shown in Figure E. This means you can customize your site to match your viewers’ requests, or at the very least, know how your viewers perceive you.
Figure E: Atomz.com shows you each word searched for and the results returned to the viewer.
Conclusion
Obviously, your site doesn’t have to include a search engine. But, when you have such powerful search options at your disposal for little or no cost, why would you do without one?
Copyright © 2000, Element K Content LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Element K Content LLC is prohibited. Element K is a service mark of Element K LLC.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on October 25, 2000
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