 Download
The Website Utility Evaluation Version (3Mb ZIP file).
The Website Utility is able to create a server-side ASP.NET search facility for a
website it crawls using the internal web robot. Adding a search facility to a website
brings major benefits to a website, making it easier to find information as well as adding
an additional method of navigating a website. Search facilities are generally well used,
and will frequently appear within the top ten most requested pages on a website.
Although there are a number of server-side search solutions available such as Index Server or ht://Dig, they can be complicated to install and configure. The
Website Utility creates a search facility that only makes use of standard ASP.NET 2.0 - no
database or third-party server components are required.
You can also link to search results for your website from Google or other major search
engines, but it can be difficult to integrate these with the design of your website. They
also carry the obvious risk of a website visitor leaving your website and not returning!
The ASP.NET search facility created by The Website Utility is straightforward for
anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML and ASP.NET to add to their website. The search box
can be added to any page on the website (so you could, for example, have a search facility
in the corner of all pages - like on www.softwaredocumentation.info). The search results page can be easily
integrated within the look and feel of an existing website. The search code is written in
C#, but being class based it can also be used on ASP.NET websites that primarily use
Visual Basic.NET.
Key Features of the ASP.NET Search Engine
Some of the key features of the ASP.NET search engine created by The Website Utility:
- Extracts indexable content from many different parts of a page (e.g. main content of
page, URL, title, meta tags, image alt tags).
- Supports URLs with QueryStrings, so http://www.mywebsite.com/News.php?ArticleID=1 is
treated as an entirely separate URL to http://www.mywebsite.com/News.php?ArticleID=2. This
is very useful if your website stores its content in a database or content management
system (CMS).
- Sophisticated ranking system ranks each page and word found in the website. Ranking
dependent upon the word's location in each page and the relative importance of that page
within the website.
- Page titles (i.e. the HTML Title tag) may be optionally displayed in search results.
- Page descriptions (i.e. the HTML Description Meta tag) may also be optionally
displayed in search results.
- Easy to integrate with an existing website's design. With an hour or two of work it
would be possible to extensively customise the display of search results.
- The Website Utility crawls your website to create the word index. Since it only sees
pages that are available on the website, there is much less chance of private or
undesirable content from being indexed when compared to using a file based system such as Index Server or ht://Dig.
- No 3rd party software, components or databases to install on web server - it only uses
standard ASP.NET.
- Search code and search data in contained in separate partial class files, so updating
the index is straightforward.
- Fully .NET Framework 2.0 compatible. The search class is fully object orientated with
methods and properties. Search results are returned in a standard DataSet which can be
used to populate most common controls such as DataGrids and DataViews.
Want to Know More?
- The www.softwaredocumentation.info
website's search facility was created using The Website Utility's ASP.NET search engine
creation tools.
- If you want to try The Website Utility's ASP search facility creation on your own
websites, a free trial version is
also available for immediate download. The trial version creates a fully functional search
facility, except that you can only search for the 50 most frequently occuring words on the
website.
- For sites with large numbers of pages or content, you may be interested in the Indexing Service Companion, which allows the
Microsoft Windows Indexing Service to index websites on remote websites. The utility
includes sample code showing how to use the Indexing Service on ASP.NET using both VB.NET
and C#.
- An alternative search solution is Search
Engine Builder, which creates fully customisable search facilities without
any programming knowledge being required.
Download
The Website Utility Evaluation Version (3Mb ZIP file).
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