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Did you know that statistically, an average user leaves a site if they are unable to find what they are looking for within 10 seconds?
It's been our experience that visitors - and all sites exist for their visitors, don't they? - are more likely to stay and buy a product if a site is easy to navigate and is otherwise user-friendly. It just happens that over time sites tend to grow, and an adequate menu system becomes too bulky, and is a challenge to use all by itself. When we reached that point, we started looking for a third party Site Search utility, and pretty quickly learned that none of them fits our requirements which are pretty simple and obvious:
- Free
- Requires no software installation
- Requires no maintenance
- Easy to use
- Non-intrusive
- sets no cookies on neither your nor your visitor's computers
- does not open annoying pop-up windows
- does not implant spy/adware
- does not violate your or your visitors' privacy…
Major search industry players will provide with a search box that first displays Web results, and - at the bottom of the page - results from your site. That means that all your competitors' sites are displayed first. They also can hardly be called "non-intrusive" as defined above. That was not exactly what we had in mind, and brought us to the conclusion that we needed to create our own SiteSearch tool.
Our proprietary utility does not store any information about your site on our domain which provides the following advantages:
- It's fast
- Any changes to your pages' code require no indexing, and, therefore, are available/searchable immediately
- There are no strings attached - just follow the link at the bottom of this page, copy the provided code, and paste it anywhere within - preferably but not necessarily - index page.
Note: Please make sure that the string is displayed EXACTLY or the tool will not work.
- Our tool will not write a single bit of code on your or your visitor's machine, and will not access any information beyond what is absolutely needed to perform it's direct function - searching for a specified string.
Our SiteSearch Tool finds a domain entrance - usually index file with any common extension that must be present in the domain root directory, extracts all links contained within that file, and searches for specified string in those files.
You can enhance the search tool functionality by adding or editing the robots.txt file. This file is used by the search engines for better and faster indexing of you site. It is essential for high site rank.
Below, are outlined the simple steps on how to create a basic robots.txt file.
- Create a text file in any basic word processor - avoid MS Word, and suchlike because they add hidden tags that cannot be processed by the search engines. Notepad in Windows and VI in Unix/Linus environments work just fine.
- Add the following line:
#begin siteSearch exactly as it appears here - make sure the "#" character precedes every line. This line indicates the beginning of the file list you want the SiteSearch Tool to search, and will be ignored by the search engines.
- Add lines containing file names you want to be searched with paths - relative to the root directory or global (#index.html or #http://www.YourDomain.com/index.html).
- Conclude the list of files with the following line:
#end siteSearch exactly as it appears here
The SiteSearch portion of the robots.txt file should look like this (make sure you substitute file names lited here as an example with your own files/paths:
#begin siteSearch
#/path/file1.html
#file1
#etc.
#end siteSearch
- Uppload/save the robots.txt file into your domain root directory
- Make sure permissions are set correctly so that the file can be read by the SiteSearch Tool. You can just type the following line at the command prompt: chmod 744 robots.txt.
- That's it!
You can test SiteSearch Utility using the form below. Please note that the "Domain" field will not appear on your page, the domain to search will be determined automatically based on the request header - it's been added here for testing only.
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Try it first:
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