Adding a search facility to a website

[An Oasis]

Been meaning to add a search facility to a website for sometime now and would appreciate your thoughts on which one to use. I had thought of using http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/editions.html (professional)

Essentials

The criteria is no 3rd party logos
Must be capable of searching static pages (html)
Needs to index in excess of 200 pages
Free or paid I don’t mind

Non essentials
It would be better if it could index images

I'm sure that I have omitted some obvious aspects, so your thoughts are more than welcome.

 

[stugster]

I've never really researched search functionality for static HTML sites - always just added the Google Search function.

Have a peek here: http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/resources/website_search_engine.php3

That site seems to run-down a list of useful solutions that might fit your needs and requirements

 

[An Oasis]

Thanks Stu

Should have also added the results need to be integrated into our website not taken to a third party site.

 

[stugster]

How big is the site? Is it at a stage where you could migrate to a Content Management System? This would slap all your content in a database, allow you to tag your images, and make searching fast and easy Just a thought R!

 

[An Oasis]

How big is the site? Is it at a stage where you could migrate to a Content Management System? This would slap all your content in a database, allow you to tag your images, and make searching fast and easy Just a thought R!

Did think about it Stu but that would mean having to 301 every page and as they are all ranking for top spots I don't want to take the chance.

 

[stugster]

I'm not entirely sure about the SEO sides of things. My impression was that the 301 shouldn't affect ranking, but I have no idea The most likely problem coming from 301'ing the site is probably ensuring the content of the new page matches (in terms of tags, meta, descriptions, and the main content too).

Just a thought, but if you've already considered it, then I'm outta ideas.

 

[UKSBD]

you could still put the content in to a database, run it as stand alone
for the search facility, and return results pointing to the existing pages.

 

[stugster]

Actually, that's not a bad idea at all.

You could find some sort of spider software that will crawl your site and dump it into a database. Have this run at midnight every day.

Once the data's in the database, the searching is pretty straight forward.

 

[zone1creative]

Take a look at the hotscripts dot com site and see if you can find an app that does this already

 

[An Oasis]

you could still put the content in to a database, run it as stand alone for the search facility, and return results pointing to the existing pages.

You could but that means two lots of updating for any/all data and adds to the overheads...nice idea though, thanks.

 

[FireFleur]

There is probably a perl script you can run over the site to build an index, and then just query from CGI if you want to keep it cheap and fast to deploy.

http://www.boutell.com/search/

http://www.perlscriptsjavascripts.com/perl/search/index.html

http://www.hotscripts.com/category/cgi-perl/scripts-programs/searching/site-search/

If you want to do it yourself or get someone to do it, it shouldn't take too long and it will probably be a little more flexible.

The process is spider the site, strip the text from the tags, grab the meta description?, and tie the text words to the pages in a hash, and then just query the hash. There are speed ups, where the page is given another lookup so you can keep the repeated data short.

 

[SFD]

If you transfer all your content into a CMS there should be no reason why you can't keep all the same structure/urls etc within your site.

 

[PR Wales]

Easiest and least labour intensive would have to be using google search I would have thought.

I set my own site search's up using google search through my adsense account.

Its just a case of setting a few parameters in my adsense control panel, including whether you want to search the entire web, or just the address('s) you pre-define.

Then its just a case of creating a static 'search results' page on my own website, the address of which is also put into my adsense account page during setup, so google knows where to display the search results. Google gives a small piece of code to paste into the HTML of your custom results page.

From that point forth if anyone uses my custom website search feature, the results are displayed on my own site, and I get embedded adsense ads surrounding the search results to boot.

Win/Win, and easy as an easy thing.

Hope this helps

Ian

 

[alphanumeric]

a site i built a while ago uses a php search script (very basic), they wanted to use contribute to edit the site so its made from static html.

http://www.casellameasurement.com

if thats the kind thing you want i can try and hunt down the source, i dont have it on me as it was completed in house for a design agency.