Choosing a Search Engine
Providing a search function is one of the most valuable tools you can provide for visitors to your website and many good options are available to you.
Inexpensive Search Engine Solutions
Search engine solution prices have dropped dramatically, making it affordable for even the smallest organization to add a search function to their website. Below are several easy-to-implement and inexpensive search engine solutions. This list is by no means comprehensive and does not imply an endorsement of these products or services.
Inexpensive solutions include:
- A link to a search engine that indexes your content
- A search box from a search engine that indexes your content, such as USA.Search.gov
- Small business or enterprise solutions from major search engines, which can be as inexpensive as $2,000.
Search Appliances
A search appliance is usually plug and play, and is maintained by you or your system administrator.
Hosted Search Solutions
Hosted search services live on a server located and are managed by a search hosting company. The host's crawler indexes the pages on your website and stores the index in a database on the remote server. When a user searches your website, the request is directed to the remote server, returning the results to the user.
Before You Choose
Consider these questions when looking for a search engine and a contractor:
- Is the main line of business to provide search services?
- Does the contractor already operate a web-based service that helps consumers find information on the Internet?
- Does the contractor already have the technical expertise and resources to provide a search service, and how are these services made available?
- Does the contractor already have all the equipment, tools, materials, personnel, and supervision to provide the service, so that you don't have to purchase anything for the requested service?
- What kinds of content areas do you want provided, and are these aggregated and integrated into the search results pages?
- Do you want just Web pages and text documents?
- Do you also want images and an audio or video search?
- What kinds of specialty searches do you want?
- Do you want specific languages, e.g., Spanish or a non-Roman language like Japanese?
- Do you want to restrict your results to specific domains, e.g., .gov, or your own agency's domain?
- Are there features to help users find information quickly and easily?
- Spellcheck that works with the languages you wish to include?
- Advanced search, that addresses specific ways of narrowing a search for your specific user population?
- Other navigation features, such as breadcrumb trails or related searches or context-driven search tips?
- How deeply does the search engine crawl a site? Some search engines only go down several levels.
- How far down do you need content to be retrieved?
- How often does the search engine crawl sites and update the index? Some sites need to be crawled more often than others because they are updated more often.
- Can dynamically generated Web content (e.g., content stored in content management systems) be crawled and indexed?
- Is new content crawled and is the index scaled to the growth of the Web?
- Are the following results cleaned up and kept current?
- HTTP errors, duplicate documents, and search engine spam, including duplicate URLs and content pages, mirrored domains, bad HTTP status codes, and custom 404 pages.
- What kinds of reports are generated and made available (e.g., traffic, usage, queries input, how often the system is up or down, etc.)?
- Are security regulations, privacy safeguards, and 508 requirements met?
Prepare a Statement of Work
Make sure your statement of work (SOW), includes the following:
- Purpose of the SOW, e.g., what services are requested and by whom and to do what?
- Add any necessary history of the process or the organization
- Content coverage
- Types of search services desired
- Timeline or phases of implementation
- General requirements of the vendor, e.g., main line of business, how they define search services, what constitutes crawling and indexing
- Non-obsolescence requirements, including search features and functionality, search technology used, scalability
- Tasks requirements, e.g., kinds of searches to be performed for specific collections, organizations, or populations
Resources
Page Updated or Reviewed: July 1, 2008
