How to put a Search Engine on your Website?

Web site managers install search engines to improve navigation for the visitors and add professional appearance to the site, marketing departments are also becoming more active in encouraging site managers to add search engines. We have a simple guide below:

Firefox allows Java Script code to install search engine plugins and supports search engine plugin formats like OpenSearch, Sherlock. Starting with Firefox 2, OpenSearch is the preferred search format for Firefox.

When JavaScript code attempts to install a search plugin, Firefox presents an alert asking the user for permission to install the plugin. To install an OpenSearch plugin, you need to use the window.external.AddSearchProvider() DOM method. The syntax for this method is:

window.external.AddSearchProvider(engineURL);

Where engineURL is the absolute URL to the XML file for the search engine plugin.
Note: OpenSearch support is available only in Firefox 2 and later.
Installing Sherlock plugins

To install a Sherlock plugin, you need to call window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(), the syntax for which is:

window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(engineURL, iconURL, suggestedName, suggestedCategory);

* The engineURL parameter is the URL to the Sherlock plugin (a ".src" file) to install.
* iconURL is the URL to an icon to associate with the plugin.
* The suggestedName parameter is only used when prompting the user for permission to install the plugin, so that a message such as "Do you want to install suggestedName from engineURL?" can be displayed.
* The suggestedCategory parameter is not used. You should specify either an empty string ("") or null.

For details on Sherlock, visit http://developer.apple.com/macosx/sherlock/
Browser search engine capability detection

Since the search engine addition APIs have changed between Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2, and since Firefox 1.5 does not support OpenSearch description files, web page authors that want to add search engines in a backwards compatible way (i.e., that will work in Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, or IE 7) must support both Sherlock and OpenSearch formats, and must detect the browser's capabilities accordingly. The following code snippet is an example of how this can be done:

function installSearchEngine() {
if (window.external && ("AddSearchProvider" in window.external)) {
// Firefox 2 and IE 7, OpenSearch
window.external.AddSearchProvider("http://example.com/search-plugin.xml");
} else if (window.sidebar && ("addSearchEngine" in window.sidebar)) {
// Firefox <= 1.5, Sherlock
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine("http://example.com/search-plugin.src",
"http://example.com/search-icon.png",
"Search Plugin", "");
} else {
// No search engine support (IE 6, Opera, etc).
alert("No search engine support");
}
}


Sphinx is another full-text search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant full text search functions to other applications. In addition to many features that make Sphinx a very interesting alternative to an open source SQL full-text search engine. Solution Point also provides scripts which you can just paste on your website and display a search engine w/o any effort for free.

Note: If you need professional help for large content driven corporate websites or Intranet, contact us.