Search Utilities
Supporting a web site is hard work. I should know, I support
sixteen of them, plus two intranets at my day job. If you do
everything properly, you (or your staff) have to design the
site, prototype it, code it, maintain it, promote it and do any
of a hundred other things. There are a bazillion details to take
care of, from the color of the text, the size of the characters
and, of course, the site navigation.
Coming up with a good navigation scheme can be very hard. The
larger the site, the more difficult the task. Having a site with
lots of pages and a good mixture of material makes it even more
difficult. How do you get your visitors to the information they
want without lots of confusing labels, pictures and links?
Virtually every site will have some top-level links on their
primary entry page. Most webmasters have learned to duplicate
those links on most or all other pages on their sites so people
can get from anywhere on the site to anywhere else.
The problem is that this only gives your visitors a few options.
If they don't see what they like, they may look at a page or
two, become frustrated and leave. This has happened to me many,
many times. I'll visit a site and if I don't see what I want
I'll go somewhere else fast.
Unless, of course, I find some way to search for what I need.
You see, adding search capabilities to your site suddenly gives
you an incredibly flexibly, user-definable navigation scheme.
Unless your site is very small, it would be extremely difficult
for you to provide a navigation scheme which gets your visitors
to anything they might need. Site specific search engines
provide this capability.
Here are some utilities which you an install on your web site
which will add searching capability for your visitors. These are
useful for the majority of webmasters which do not run their own
servers. In these instances, a remote utility of some kind is
essential as few (if any) hosts will allow you to modify their
servers as needed.
Atomz http://www.atomz.com You want to add a search engine to
your site to allow visitors to search your site? Atomz has an
incredible number of features. You can spider up to 500 pages
for free - the only cost to you being a few advertisements in
your results page. Recommended.
Whatuseek http://intra.whatuseek.com/index.shtml An excellent
service, providing spidering of up to 1,000 pages for free. Not
quite as many options as Atomz, but still quick, efficient and
very configurable. Highly recommended.
Everyone.Net http://www,everyone.net A personalized search
engine which allows web searches or searches of just your site.
Allows you to change the colors and logo on the results page.
Freefind http://www.freefind.com/indexc.html Very nice search
utility. You get to index your site plus a handy set of other
features including site maps, content monitoring (similar to
Netmind), customization and a what's new report. Excellent
service. The free version gives you 25mb of indexing (the size
of your pages), and you can pay for more.
SiteMiner http://siteminer.mycomputer.com/ Siteminer gives you
the capability to add a search engine to your site specially for
your own site. Note: This is not free, but included as it is a
useful service.