Forum Moderators: phranque
A friend of mine has asked me if I could design a website for his "small" business and I have agreed to "try" and help out.
He needs a "Search Form" for his website so that visitors can search for items at the touch of a Search button without having to scan the entire website looking for 1 product.
Now, I am not familiar at all with the security side of forms, though I have coded a form on the website in question (which I have uploaded to mine for now for the purpose of testings).
What I need is for someone to tell me exactly what I need for this search form to become a workable search form, so that the visitors get back the results that they are looking for.
What extra files would I need upload to the server and where?
How/where do I add such things as "keywords", if needed.
I believe that I need some sort of "processing" script so that the forms returns the necessary information required.
I have tried other forums, but with no luck on any replies.
I hope someone here can help me figure this out as this is new to me.
Thank you in advance for your time.
Jay
[edited by: phranque at 3:54 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2008]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Why not use something like Google Custom Search Engine [google.com] or the Yahoo Search Builder [builder.search.yahoo.com]? Those are pretty simple to implement.
Lets say I wanted to search for my ink cartridge which happens to be Acme Blue Widget XYZ, I would type in in XYZ and it should give me the correct results, but how does it know where to search. Would I have to have a HTML file listing all the XYZ cartridges?
Thanks for your continued help.
Jay
[edited by: phranque at 4:29 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2008]
[edit reason] examplified [/edit]
the way most searches work efficiently is through indexing.
the simplest way to describe this is that there is a list of all possible words and for each word there is a list of the urls that have been indexed containing that word.
the search engines index basically everything they can find.
therefore they can provide search capability to embed on your site which searches only the subset of indexed pages from your domain.
the WebmasterWorld search forms [webmasterworld.com] are "powered by" the search engines' indexes.
you could implement your own search engine if required (such as on an intranet) and there are several open source search engines you can look at such as ht://Dig [htdig.org] and apache lucene [lucene.apache.org].
phranque - Firstly, thank you for the welcome, appreciated.
So as long as my pages are indexed correctly and uploaded in the normal way (dumb question maybe, but couldn't think of anything else LOL).
Would it be also good for the correct "keywords" in the Meta Tags on the appropriate pages?
How do I make sure that my pages are indexed correctly, so that visitors get back the appropriate feedback, if you see what I mean.
Apologies for the continued questions. I just want to make sure that I get this right (everything set up as it should be), as this is pretty much new to me.
Thanks again for the support.
Jay
