A Comparison of Three Website Search Platforms
A staple of all web sites is the ability for visitors to perform a keyword search for information. As a web design consultant, a pay a great deal of attention to the “browsability” of a website. By that I mean the ability for visitors to find the information they are looking for by following the navigation that I’ve laid out for them. Ideally, browsers should find their target within about 3 clicks. There is a great deal of attention paid to areas of Internet Marketing such as Web Design Usability , Information Architecture, and User Experience – all aspects of a users ability to follow links that take them to desired information.
With that said, there is a significant portion of web visitors simply prefer to search for information rather than browse. Attempts to turn “browsers” into “searchers” and vice-versa will largely go unfulfilled and result in a poor User Experience. Instead, embrace the different methods by which your audience prefers to use your site. Here are 3 tools that could be candidates for your site search platform.
Spiderline is a paid service that allows you to select the number of pages, total data amount, and number of crawls per month. Using these combinations of factors, pricing varies from $8 to $320 per month. Built on the popular Java Lucene platform, Spiderline is a hosted solution serves results from your website search index directly from their servers. By implementing a few short lines of code on your site, you have as much, or as little, search result data as you want. Spiderline has been in existence since 2001, with dozens of customers such as Brigham Young University, City of Savannah, and the US Dept. of Transportation.
Google Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE). The CSBE is the newest product in this field, having been announced via the Official Google Blog on July 17th, 2007. However, it is a repackaging of the existing Google Custom Search Engine platform specifically targeted to SMBs. As announced, “CSBE is a hosted site search solution that provides Google-quality results for your website.” After an account is created, your webmaster simply copies and pastes a few lines of code into your existing website. You now have a mini-Google dedicated to your site, along with a control panel for administration. While I have not had occasion to implement CSBE, it appears that Google is now offering the same set of services as Spiderline – for free.
Nutch is a Java based Apache Project that also builds on Lucene Java. Yahoo! Research Labs has donated hardware and helped to fund development of the project. Whereas Spiderline and Google CSBE are hosted solutions, Nutch is open source web-search software that is installed on your web server directly. You will require the services of a Java Server-Side developer – your webmaster may not be able to perform this type of configuration to your site. By taking the search platform software in-house, you now have complete flexibility on the number of crawls, number of pages, and display of search results.
Depending on the size of your website, the different types of content available on your site, and your internal resources, each of these 3 platforms could be suitable. As with most aspects of web development, it’s imperative to understand your business objectives and needs before selecting your implementation path or target technologies.
