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Adding Search Functionality To Your Site
Having
your very own search engine for your site will enable your visitors to
quickly and easily find just what they are looking for, without having to
navigate through numerous menus or wade through long lists of options.
Your users can just type in a few keywords for what interests them, and
within seconds they are shown to the exact pages on your website that are
relevant.
Usability
studies show us that more than half of all web users are search-dominant,
meaning that they will go straight to the search box when they enter your
site, rather than try to find information following your navigation links.
They are not interested in looking around the site but rather in finding
what they want as fast as possible.
That
is why, if your site has a large number of pages or covers a wide variety
of topics, we recommend that you set up a search engine for your site.
There are several services that offer free search engines that allow your
visitors to search your site. The two we have tried are FreeFind
and Google.
Both of them are free and worth a try.
Freefind is a great option, particularly because you can select your
desired indexing frequency. This means that if you update your site weekly
or even daily, you can instruct Freefind's spider to crawl your site with
that same frequency, so that all your pages are indexed (added to the
database) as often as you update your site.
Aside from that, you can index up to 3,000 average-size pages with your
free account, which is more than enough for most websites. Also, Freefind
automatically generates a site map for your site; a site map is a great
tool to help your visitors navigate your site, and to quickly allow the
search engines to pick up all your pages when they crawl your site.
Google also has a free feature that allows you to get a search engine for
your site, which will give your visitors the option of searching the web
or only your site. However, this feature has its drawbacks. The main one
is that only pages that are already in Google's database will be displayed
in the results, and you can't instruct Google to crawl your site at your
desired frequency. Instead, you will have to wait until Google crawls the
web (usually once a month) before more of your pages can be added to
Google's database. Therefore, Google is a good option if most of your
pages are already indexed and you don't update your site that often.
We recommend that you follow these guidelines when setting Search on
your site:
Make the search function easily available from every page on your site.
Try to include a search box in the page itself, instead of just a text
link that takes you to a search page. The search box shape is easily
recognizable and users will find it much faster than a text link. If you
don't want to use a search box in all your pages, use a search box on your
homepage and a link to the search page from your interior pages.
Place the search box in a consistent an easy to find location across your
site. Based on the observation of numerous important websites, the
preferred location for the search box seems to be the top right corner of
the page.
Try to make the search box wide enough (between 20 and 25 characters) to
accommodate longer queries.
Label the search button next to the search box with the word "Search"
(no need to get too fancy or creative with phrases like "Take me
there" or "Go!". Keep it simple.)
Finally, please note that installing search functionality is no excuse for
designing a poor navigation architecture (don't forget the other half of
your visitors, who are likely to follow links rather than search). Users
want to know where they are within your website at all times, and like to
find their way around easily. The best way to enable this is:
To have few but clear navigation options (no need to include links to all
your pages from all your pages).
To group your navigation options by subject, and
To include a "breadcrumb trail" next to the top of the page,
where you can show your visitors the complete path to the current page,
starting with your homepage (for example: home -> archive -> June 03
-> Web Design Tips ).
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