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View Full Version : Is there a GOOD search bar for your site?

offthedome
June 13th, 2007, 05:44 PM
I mean for actually searching your own site.

Is there a good search bar that can be placed on a site?

Seriously ... google's searchbar sucks. I've tested it using my major keywords, and sometimes it finds none. It's really that bad.
Greg-J
June 13th, 2007, 05:53 PM
Your site needs to be indexed and updated regularly for Google to find it important enough to spider enough to provide relevant and current results.
offthedome
June 13th, 2007, 06:02 PM
Your site needs to be indexed and updated regularly for Google to find it important enough to spider enough to provide relevant and current results.

I get indexed pretty quickly on the site I had the bar on, but for about 6 months the site-search feature just completely failed.

Actually, I just remembered that going directly to google.com and searching for
address munger site:addressmunger.com
gave me results while the site-search feature on my site gave me none, and this was after six months!!

I'd give google's site-search feature a 0/10. To give it a 1/10, I just require that it be more effective AND efficient than just reading .....
LinkPromo
June 13th, 2007, 06:04 PM
Even if that is the case, I find that a more custom solution will often serve you better.

Check out PHPDig (http://www.phpdig.net/). I swear by it on several sites.
offthedome
June 13th, 2007, 06:48 PM
Even if that is the case, I find that a more custom solution will often serve you better.

Check out PHPDig (http://www.phpdig.net/). I swear by it on several sites.
I'm checking it out now. They don't seem to have very good support. Is that right?

Any other suggestions while I'm still working?
ItsUreBoy446
July 2nd, 2007, 11:13 PM
If your talking about a search for your sites content
I used one that was pretty simple
Ill get you a link.
nickthrolson
July 2nd, 2007, 11:25 PM
i have a toolbar for my users check out ycs in my sig
holdfire
July 3rd, 2007, 09:33 AM
Someone else posted about this in another thread that I replied in. I linked them some resources to creating their own search engine for their website. Here's the post (http://myspacepros.com/forum/showpost.php?p=95852&postcount=6) that I left.
George
July 3rd, 2007, 09:41 AM
If you're using anything but google paid search on your site you're throwing money away.

SEO your site properly. Use google webmaster tools - specifically google sitemaps and get your site indexed/crawled properly.

I have a myspace site getting only 2k uniques per day and it still makes $5 or so per day in search alone.
Jazzylee77
July 3rd, 2007, 10:03 AM
I'm using drupals search feature and suspect it is slowing my site way down. I may replace the drupal search bar with google but still use drupal's search to generate different search subject pages.
myspacemaster
July 3rd, 2007, 10:41 AM
I mean for actually searching your own site.

Is there a good search bar that can be placed on a site?

Seriously ... google's searchbar sucks. I've tested it using my major keywords, and sometimes it finds none. It's really that bad.

You might try these:

http://www.freefind.com/
http://www.picosearch.com/
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/
NYCBORN
July 5th, 2007, 12:42 PM
I'm with George on this one. SEO your site get indexed and Google Search away.
offthedome
July 5th, 2007, 01:11 PM
I'll check out all the suggestions.

I'm with George on this one. SEO your site get indexed and Google Search away.
I'm looking for a search bar that will work 100% of the time. Google is extremely good at indexing very fewof the words in your site, and also indexing incompletely. Their method is obviously effective for their general search engine, but they really dropped the ball when making site search bars.

Even more, have you ever noticed the results from a site search bar are different from the results from google.com?
NYCBORN
July 5th, 2007, 01:22 PM
I'll check out all the suggestions.


I'm looking for a search bar that will work 100% of the time. Google is extremely good at indexing very fewof the words in your site, and also indexing incompletely. Their method is obviously effective for their general search engine, but they really dropped the ball when making site search bars.

Even more, have you ever noticed the results from a site search bar are different from the results from google.com?

It works pretty good for me. You are losing out on revenue by not using it but hey thats on you.