I want to give my visitors the ability to search the web (and possibly search my site, as well) from my web site. Having done some research, would my better bet be to go with Hitbox/Yep.com, GoTo.com, or Lycos.com's search engines on my site?
What are the benefits or differences in these seemingly similar services? Is it simply personal preference and visual look?
Just curious as to what my best route for placing a web/site search tool on my site would be while maintaining a professional look! (I am also aware that I could use a script to install my own, but I'd like to weigh all my options!)
Why not use the DMOZ directory? This is a fast growing directory of sites that are reviewed by thousands of expert volunteers. The Directory is used by many search engines, including Lycos, Hotbot and Snap, today to increase their lists of sites. There are scripts available to integrate this seamlessly into your site drawing traffic and offering advanced search options while keeping visitors at your site which can increase your advertising revenue.
The reason that all the search engines offer search boxes to be placed on websites is it brings them more visitors and in turn more revenue. Once your visitors enter in their keywords and click that search button they are no longer your visitors. The benefit of adding search is to keep users coming back to your site. If they can go directly to the search engine and get more advanced searches they won't come back as often.
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Wayne Luke
The Majormud Encyclopedia - www.bloodquest2.com
Come Play one of the hottest games on the net.
I visited the DMOZ open directory site and am interested in this approach. However, the one thing I couldn't gather from the site which you mentioned is HOW do I integrate the search into my site while keeping my visitors at my site once the results are displayed? What kind of scripts available are you refering to? (frames?)
YOU WROTE: <<scripts available to integrate this seamlessly into your site drawing traffic and offering advanced search options while keeping visitors at your site which can increase your advertising revenue>>
I do see your point, fairhousing
, however, now the question becomes is having a search tool pay you 3-6 cents per search WORTH the fact that at that point the visitors are no longer yours, and are now at the search engines site?! (GoTo.com, for example, pays you a FRACTION of 1 cent for each search if you want it intergrated on your site! Is that really worth the money?)
The point was also made that instead of having search engines take away your visitors, it might be more beneficial for you to have them remain at your site while getting more revenue from your own banner ads!?
There are a couple of CGI scripts listed on CGI Resources that integrate the DMOZ directory into your site. One is called Personal Open Directory and the other is called Anaconda Open Directory. The first is free and the second costs about $199 US.
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Wayne Luke
The Majormud Encyclopedia - www.bloodquest2.com
Come Play one of the hottest games on the net.
I use the Open Directory on my site, it is totally integrated into my site and they never leave my site to begin with. Since I pull down the data in real-time and reformat it for my site, I also do not need to worry about maintaining it. I don't see this as competing with Yahoo, Northernlight or any other database but as a means of providing added features for my users. I even have facilities for them to try their searches on around 10 different engines if they wish to.
I implemented different search engines on my site and found that people like the idea that they launch a new window, because when they're done what they're doing, they can find our site again easily.
Also alta-vista has a standard .02 per click but premium up to .06 per click, Lycos is at .03 and most of the others are at .03 as well. You can check out what I did on my megasearch page at http://www.keepitontrack.com
One of my problems I still have is that I want to add a search of my site and ONLY my site so people can find things within the site (there are lots of pages and there are more we're adding every day). The different options I've used don't allow me to index my own site. And I don't want to use something like verity or FrontPage searching right now until we move over to our new web host, so does anyone have a suggestion?
April
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