Search within my own website

How can I add a search box to my own website?

There are a couple of different options for search boxes.

Sitewide Search:

One way of adding a sitewide search box is to go to DESIGN > ADD TEMPLATE WIDGETS then choose where and what kind of widget you would like on the next screen. 

Product Search

To add product search to your shopping page, go to SHOP SETUP > CUSTOMISE DISPLAY OPTIONS

Then choose what kind of search box you would like from the drop down menu by SEARCH OPTION. 

Why use our inbuilt search engine?

• Our search results will be displayed within the look and feel of your website, so your main menu navigation is still accessible
• If the results have photo's associated with them a thumbnail with be included with the results
• No other website results nor adverts will be displayed, ensuring that competitors won't be able to poach your traffic.
• Users still have the oprtunity of searching within your site using google, but this option is given them AFTER they have search with the inbuilt search engine.

Why use a third party search widget?

• Our search feature uses a very simple exact match key-phrase algorithm to find matching pages. The order of those pages is predetermined and may not return the most appropriate page to the top.
• Whereas google/yahoo spend alot of time/money refining their algorithms to ensure the best pages are most likely at the top of the results.
• WATCH THIS SPACE - We are constantly working to improve features such as our inbuilt search, the gap is narrowing between 'ours' and 'theirs'

Our Suggestion

• Use our search feature if you don't have too big a website or are very concerned about keeping people on your page.
• Use a third party search if you have a big website and quality/order of the results is most important to you

What is our search logic?

• The order of results is determined by type of pages and or components of the pages. eg
  1. Our search logic searches the most likely pages first, eg the main menu and submenu, looking for a keyword match on the page title, menu button name or meta description.
  2. It then searches the products and informational pages for their headings or summary descriptions. It does not search their full text pages at this stage.
  3. Then it searches the full text of individual single plain pages
  4. Then finally it searches the full text of individual faq/gallery/advertiser pages
• For the first 2 searches above, it uses a loose keyphrase match, where your keywords must be matched in the right order, but no limit on the space between the 2 words. eg a search for "big bear" will match "big brown bear" but won't match "a bear that is big".
• For the last 2 searches above, it uses a tight keyphrase match, where your keywords must be close together, to use the same example, a search for "big bear" will match "the big bear is brown" but won't match "the big brown bear".
• There are no synonyms used in searches.
• Formating and HTML codes are ignored in the search

Notes on future improvements

• Yes, we plan to address the ordering of results, ensuring that any page with more matches will be listed first.
• We plan to ensure that no page is listed twice on the search results page
• The biggest issue with our search is that there is a lot of content to search, some of it on disk, and some of it in a database.