How to Get a Search Engine for Your Web site

Search engines are complicated for a novice to develop and set up. Luckily, there are solutions available to help small business owners add search functionality to their sites. There are several options available, depending on your expertise and the time you're willing to commit to the project.

For the faint of heart, the easiest thing to do is to use Google's free SiteSearch. By cutting and pasting some HTML code, you can add Google-powered search to your site in seconds. You can even customize the search results to incorporate your site's look and feel.

The only stipulation when using SiteSearch is that Google has to have crawled all the pages on your site for the search to be truly effective. In fact, if you've just launched your site, you may want to wait for Google to crawl your site before adding SiteSearch. You can check which pages Google has crawled on your site by typing "site:www.yourdomain.com" into the search box.

There are other free search programs, but none have the reach that Google does. Start by checking out FreeFind.

If you need a more robust solution that you can modify and tailor, check out one of the commercial products from Verity or, better yet, the open source Java-based Lucene project. Both of these will require your development team to roll up their sleeves, but you'll start the effort with a very robust tool set from which to roll your own engine.