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Thursday, January 4, 2001 |
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Atomz Search
We just added a new search engine called "Atomz.search" to the BIGSEA website. You may be asking yourself: "What is Atomz.search?".
Atomz.search is a sophisticated search engine that indexes the content on your web site so that users can find what they are looking for more easily. Atomz.search indexes the content just like the major search engines: it uses a "spider" to "crawl" the links in your site and index the text content that it finds.
A few days ago, we added Excite! search cababilities to the BIGSEA website. The two search engines, while they both provide search functionality to your site, are very different in implementation.
Excite! search is a cgi script that resides on your web hosting server. Because it is local to the server, it can see all of the files on your server whether they have a link to them or not. What this means is that if you don't limit the files that the Excite! search engine can index, it will index much more than you want it to. The first time we generated an index using the Excite! engine, it indexed all of the text files on our server in addition to the public html pages. When we did some test searches, we were surprised to see that the Excite! engine had indexed many files that we did not want the public to see. This is not to say that the Excite! search engine is inherently bad; it is actually quite useful and fairly easy to configure. To try the Excite search engine, click here.
Atomz.search is a free (for sites that are 500 pages or less) service provided by Atomz.com. To try a sample search using the Atomz.search engine, enter a keyword in the box in the left margin of this page and click the "Search" button. Atomz.search has some great features:
- The "search" and "results" pages are (almost) completely customizable.
- Atomz.search can be scheduled to re-index your site on a regular basis.
- Atomz.search tracks the keywords your visitors used to search your site and can create summary reports of the searches to help you understand what your customers are looking for.
- Atomz.search "crawls" your site just like the major search engines, so the only pages it can index are pages that have links pointing to them.
- During the indexing process, the Atomz.search engine finds broken links and reports them to you so that they can be corrected.
- Atomz.search offers advanced search functionality to help your visitors better define their search queries. To see an example of the advanced search, click here.
Which engine would we recommend? They are both good search engines and they each have unique features. If you want to implement a search engine for your web site and aren't sure which engine is better for you, give us a call. We're here to help.
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