Intro

Checking Links

Test Index

Test Search

Search Forms

Result Pages

Search Result Items

Maintenance & Logs

Choose the Service For You

Remote search services provide almost-instant gratification: you can test them as soon as they're done with the indexing. Most of them have a test search form on their site: if not, copy their form to your local page and try it out.

Searching

There are two basic kinds of search queries: those which match pages on your site that contain every search term and those that match any search term, though they may not show you every matching page . A few will let searchers choose the best approach.

If your site contains text from other languages, you need to watch out for letter matching issues. Some search engines can only match the 26 English characters, while others can match diacritical characters (such as î and á) and special characters (ø and ß). PicoSearch and MondoSearch also offer multilingual interfaces. Non-Roman scripts such as Arabic, Russian and Japanese are even harder, although PicoSearch offers results in Chinese.

Relevance Ranking

When you do a search, and the engine locates a set of pages that match your search, it has to sort them as best it can. This is particularly difficult with one and two word searches -- it's hard to tell which is the most relevant page (the best match).

Like hairstyles and music, success in relevance ranking is a matter of taste. You should do a number of searches to see what you think of any search engine you choose. Try searches with just one word, others with two, and still others with four or five. This should give you a feeling for the kinds of relevance ranking that a search engine will do.

Search Features