Wilk4: Site Keyword Search Notes

I've tested a couple of web applications for site searching. I've definitely settled on AtomZ and am using it on a few other sites as well. Try my site keyword search if you like. Below are my notes from my comparison testing of several hosted search services. Hope you find them useful. See also Website Search Tools, a directory of many available website search tools with reviews, examples, news and a guide to help you select a search tool. Good luck. ~jeff

Atomz Search Notes:
  • Best so far.
  • Highly recommended (and used by) some large sites like WebMonkey and O'Reilly.
  • Very customizable, can use templates or edit templates for exactly what you want.
  • No banner ads required, either on your site or in the search results.
  • Very fast
  • Multiple ways to control the indexing and ranking, obeys robots.txt, uses META tags, set includes or excludes via the interface, etc.
  • You can see reports on both the indexing and on the queries being used by visitors.
  • When indexing, you can see a report of exactly what it found and indexed.
  • Indexing on demand or weekly on a schedule.
  • You can define Collections, areas to limit the search to. (see mine above)
  • Check out reseller program
  • You can set up multiple websites under one login account.
FreeFind Notes: NetMind Search-it Notes:
  • You may not get results on partial words. "Squawk" gets no results while "Squawks" gets 2. I've requested that this be enhanced/fixed and they agree, but haven't yet. This is a serious flaw/limitation.
  • FF also provides functions to automagically generate sitemaps and what's new pages, though I prefer doing my own.
  • FF seems to have more controls to let the webmaster pick and choose what to do and how to present the results.
  • Re-indexing can be on some schedule or just when you tell it to respider.
  • I can give my files meta tags to control the indexing and the descriptions.
  • One thing I've seen is that it sometimes gives a loading error and you have to hit reload on your browser a time or two to get the page.
  • Re-indexing is automatically done every week. They are planning to let you set the schedule and manually request re-indexing.
  • Search-It obeys the robots.txt files. Need to find out the specific ID string for their robot.
  • Indexes up to 500 pages.
  • See their FAQ
  • NetMind also has a Mind-It function that lets users request an email when certain pages are updated or when certain keywords appear in an update to a page.
General Notes:
  • This page is mostly to test these remote search web apps, not that our site is large enough to really need a search engine... still it can be useful even here.
  • These may not show all pages until I get the indexing set up correctly. IE, still in test...
  • One big advantage of these is that they are doing indexed searches, ie. they make an index of the site contents periodically and search against that. It's much faster than searching against the actual pages every time as most free scripts do. (and as our cpc search engine does)
  • See also Web Design Links: Website Applications/Functions
  • Similar services which I have *not* yet tested yet include WhatUseek-intraSearch, SiteMiner and SearchButton.com.
  • Builder.Com has a 1998 article on selecting and installing search at Add search to your site.
  • Webmonkey article: Adding Search to Your Site