Site Search Solutions: 3 methods for implementing search on your site
In looking to improve the site search on MarketingSherpa (the site is 13 years old, and we have 2,991 case studies and articles, so an effective site search is crucial to helping you find marketing industry information to help you do your job better), the tech team here at MECLABS has explored different site search tools.
The team identified three predominant site search methods:
Method #1: Install a search engine on your own server
In our case, we were specifically looking at PHP scripts, since we use that on MarketingSherpa.
In general, there are two types of PHP or Perl search engine scripts. One will search your entire website for the relevant article each time your visitor invokes the search engine. The other creates an index of your site, and only searches the index when the visitor uses the engine.
The former is easier to configure and use for the newcomer, but it quickly becomes sluggish when your website grows big. The latter is more efficient, but often requires you to remember to re-index your site each time you change your pages.
Advantages:
- Customizable page results
- No third-party advertisements
- Re-index as needed
- Re-indexing your site does not increase your bandwidth utilization, unless the script accesses your site via HTTP
Disadvantages:
- Need PHP support on Web server
- Will need to be able to edit PHP to configure your site search tool
Some PHP Search Engine scripts:
