May 2007   

Greetings,

Welcome to Circle Talk from New Circle Consulting. It is our goal to bring you industry tips, news & great ideas which you may find helpful to your business.

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Everyone talks about Search Engine Optimization to drive traffic to your site via search results. But have you thought of adding an in-site search feature to help people find what they need once they are on your site? If you have a website that contains over 20 pages and you don't have in-site search yet, you might want to read on to see the options available.

Option A: Google in-site Search

Yes, Google. You can specify a parameter and conduct a search using Google but only within your own website.

< form action = "http://www.google.com/search" method = "get" onSubmit = "this.query.value='site:www.yourdomain.com '+this.query.value" > < input class = "inputbox" name = "query" type = "text" / > < input type = "submit" value = "Go" class = "button" / > </ form >

Pros: Very simple to set up, no cost on your end beyond implementation, no cost to vendor either.

Cons: The results page is on google.com , and there is no control of the look and feel of the results page.

Option B: Third Party Search with Template Customization

Sign up for an in-site service with vendors like freefind (freefind.com). The Freefind server will periodically index pages on your site and store in their database.

Pros: Low development cost: you only need to create an account with freefind and do an initial setup and template upload. Both PDF and Word files can be searched.

Cons: The search results page will be on freefind.com. You don't have full control of the results page. But, the results page can be customized with a page template, and you can put your logo and navigation up (no javascript dropdown menu is allowed though).

Also there is some cost associated, http://www.freefind.com/plans .html

Option C: Build Your Own Custom Search Solution

You can write code to index all content to your database and build your own search feature.

Pros: You have complete control of not only the look and feel of the search results page, but also how the search is conducted. If you would like to promote certain pages on the results page, you can program the search to give these pages a higher rank.

Cons: Relatively high development cost. Depending on how sophisticated you would like your search to be, the development effort can be high. A few things you might want to consider:

• Using full text search so your search can go beyond a simple string match
• Putting effort to make sure the PDFs and Word docs are searchable
• Automating the process further so that a script periodically indexes the site without human intervention.

Option D: Google Mini

Within this four-item list, Google is mentioned for the second time. But this is all about search, which is almost a synonym for Google's business.

Google Mini is a piece of hardware with software embedded. You purchase the hardware and host it somewhere with a good internet connection, usually in a data center. Then you configure Google Mini to index your website and also integrate the Google Mini search to your website. The search experience will then be very similar to how search is done at Google.com.

Google Mini is suitable for indexing good-sized websites or websites with multiple subsites.

Pros: Google Mini works with over 220 different file formats and can be integrated with existing security systems.

Cons: Relatively higher cost. The most affordable version of Google Mini costs approximately $2000 a year. It can search up to 50,000 documents. There is additional cost associated with hosting the Google Mini hardware at a data center.

To learn more about Google Mini, visit:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/