Web Site Search Software | Custom Search Engine Software

Site search is one of the most useful features you can add to your website. It enables visitors to find exactly the information they need in a quick and easy manner.

Best Rank currently supports site search for

Drupal sites, versions 5 and 6
E-commerce sites
Custom built websites

Surprisingly, more than half of today’s webmasters still haven’t added site search software to their websites. This is mostly because people tend to think that search tools are too complex or costly. In fact, this is hardly the case. Web site search software is just one of the services that Best Rank uses to help optimize our client’s websites and make them attractive and easy for visitors to use.

Example Site Search

Below is a screen shot of a sample site search results page. Results are displayed on the left and dynamic search facets are displayed on the right. Search facets allow the user to drill down and refine their search. As an administrator, search facets are fully configurable and can appear in any order desired. Facets can also be customized on a per client basis and need not be the same as shown here - for example "post date" and "type" are two facets in the below example but it's possible to modify the system to use custom facets such as "price" or "popularity" if the site is e-commerce based.

Benefits of Site Search Engine Software

If you’re operating a five page site you probably don’t need to include a site search into your website, but then again you're likely not getting much organic traffic. Larger sites however, such as e-commerce stores, with a more complex architecture and a large number of pages, are generally expected to have some type of site or product search available to users.

Some of the benefits that come with site search include:

Usability improvement - lets visitors navigate more easily through the information provided by your site, allowing them to quickly find the exact piece of information they need.
Higher level of user trust - a good site search will generally result in visitors using the search again and again... Google is one great example.
Longer time on site - studies have shown that a useful site search option can lead to higher level of user trust and as a result a longer time on site. With a site search yielding longer visits can mean your customers are looking are more pages/products.
Higher sales volume - A higher level of trust combined with longer on site times allows customers to make more informed purchasing decisions and can lead to an increased level of sales.

How Site Search Software Works

Site search systems are essentially smaller versions of the larger search engines. Rather than crawling through the entire web, however, Best Rank provides it's customers the ability to offer a custom search engine to their end users, powered and hosted by Best Rank, that serves up only content from the website in question.

Best Rank can index any or all of the pages on your website and then we store the indexed content on our servers.
Best Rank provides the customer with a URL that can be queried via REST parametes (the search query) and at which point returns an XML feed of the search results.
The customer can choose to implement their own front end search interface to allow their visitors to perform searches and display the resulting XML feed in any way they desire - or Best Rank can implement a custom front end search interface solution.

Search Technology Specifics

Our search technology is fast, flexible and incredibly powerful - remember, because we host the search index your website's resources are not taxed and can serve up search results lightning fast. For those technically savy here are some of the features our search engine consists of:

Boolean operators and sub expressions (sub queries)
Range queries (numeric, date and text ranges)
Synonym filtering/matching
Stemming filtering/matching
Word delimiter filtering/matching
Phrase queries and term proximity searching
Fuzzy query search
Spell checking ("did you mean ... ?")
Similar results ("more like this ...")
Inclusive/non-inclusive queries (all items that do or do not include ...)
Score boosting and Function queries (we dynamically apply a user defined function to boost search term relevancy at index or query time. For example, if you had an e-commerce shop and during a clearance or sale of certain item you could boost up the value of those products to temporarily increase their visibility and help them potentially sell better)
Filtering (force certain types of searches only)

Optimizing for Site Search

In order for your site search tool to be useful, it’s important that you optimize your pages for your web site search software in the same way that you optimize your site so that it can be easily indexed by the major search engine spiders. This means providing your internal search engine with good content, keywords, meta tags and an easy to access navigational structure.

At Best Rank, we use the same proven organic SEO techniques that give our client’s high visibility on Google, Yahoo! and Bing searches to devise useful and effective site search tools for them as well.

Simplicity is the Key

They key to making the search feature on your website accessible and effective, is to integrate it into your web design in a way that is simple and straightforward. Make the search box a type in field, rather than a separate search page. Statistics show that having a search box instead of a search link to a separate page increases the changes that visitors will actually use the search feature by 91%.

Place the search field directly on your home page, somewhere near the top (upper center or upper right is best) so that it is clearly visible. This way, visitors can start searching immediately for what they want without having to wait for another page to load.

The search box itself should be wide enough to display all or most of the search terms. If the search box is so small that most of the query disappears as they’re typing, visitors will get confused. In terms of search results pages, a moderate amount of results is best (50 per page at most), as not very many people like to scroll though a huge list of results.

If implemented correctly, web site search software can add a whole new dimension of interactivity and usability to your website site. Give us a call today or fill out our contact form to learn more about this useful feature and about how Best Rank can help you best implement it into your business’s website.