Whether you're running a large site for a company or your own corner of the Web, a search engine will bolster its usefulness. Dave Carter explains.

With billions of Web pages and mountains of data stored in online repositories, it's vital to include a search facility on all but the most basic of sites. Although Google offers a site search feature, building your own simple search engine is a more rewarding option.

Google's site search allows you to restrict searches to a singledomain, in effect providing a search engine for your site. Simply add "site:<url>" to either the beginning or end of your search query. 

Google it: Google can be used to search most sites on the Web, but it's a lot more professional and fun to build your own search engine.

For instance, the query for a search of "Business" on www.southwestcomputing.biz would look like this: 

business site:SouthWestComputing.biz

What is needed now is a form on your own page that allows users to search your site without having to head over to Google. A simple HTML form will do the trick. Here is an example which keeps search results limited to www.southwestcomputing.biz:

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" method='GET"> 
Search SouthWestComputing:
<input type="hidden" name="q" value="site:SouthWestComputing.biz">
<input name="q" size="20">
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Search">
</form>

The "site:<url>"option is passed to Google as a hidden input value. This ensures the search is always on the selected domain rather than the entire Internet, so the user doesn't have to enter the option every time. Google requires no other special values, just the query itself.

Note: Be aware that to search your whole site Google needs to have spidered it ALL. This can sometimes take quite a while so make sure every page has been checked and is in the Google database before using this approach.