Nathan Gwilliam Blog :: e-Business, Social Enterprise, Faith

For years the Adoption.com website tried to provide its own site search, yet we always struggled with the quality of search results and keeping the search index current.  Then, Google launched its SiteSearch technology allowing website owners to leverage the powerful, industry-leading Google search quality and add premium features to their search such as synonyms (For example, someone searching for the keyword “Arizona” will also be shown results for synonym keywords such as “AZ”).

Adoption.com and thousands of other websites have migrated their site search to Google SiteSearch, which is a free solution providing much higher quality search results.  (To test this technology, do a search in the search box on the upper right of the Adoption.com website.)  However, the biggest problem has been that Google SiteSearch will only show pages in the results that are contained in the Google search index.  For example, Google does not index all of the “deep” content on the Adoption.com website, such as all of the records in the Adoption.com Reunion Registry or the posts in the Adoption.com Forums.  As a result, the websites which use Google SiteSearch are usually not allowing their site visitors to search all of the website content.

Also, Google SiteSearch has not allowed any preferencing of content if a website owner wanted a certain section of content to show up higher in search results than another section.  However, Google SiteSearch has been the best option available, so website owners have continued to use it.

Google has just announced a premium version of Google SiteSearch that solves these problems.  For a fee, Google will now include all of the content from the website within the search results of Google SiteSearch.  Also, with this paid service, website owners can preference content on their site that they would like to show higher or lower in search results.

The pricing can be moderately expensive if you have a very large number of pages of content on your website.  However, for the quality of search results that Google SiteSearch provides, along with the ability to monetize those search results through Google Adsense, most website owners will probably feel that the pricing is fair.

Posted on June 4th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Google, User Experience & Usability, e-Business