 Download
The Website Utility Evaluation Version (3Mb ZIP file).
Why Use a JavaScript Search Facility?
The Website Utility is able to create a client-side JavaScript 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. To create
a search page with these solutions, programming knowledge of server-side scripting
languages such as Active Server Pages (ASP) or PHP is also usually required, or you will
need to pay somebody to create the code for you.
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 JavaScript search facility created by The Website Utility is straightforward for
anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript 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 this website!). The search results page can be
easily integrated within the look and feel of an existing website.
Key Features of the JavaScript Search Engine
Some of the key features of the JavaScript search engine created by the website
utility:
- Extracts indexable content from many different parts of a page (e.g. 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.
- Page titles (i.e. the HTML Title tag) may be optionally displayed in search results.
- Easy to integrate with an existing website's design. This JavaScript
search engine created using The Website Utility was designed to fit in with the
existing look and feel of the brettb.com website. Customisation took less
than an hour. The search results page was designed specifically to resemble the results
from the website's existing Index
Server/ASP powered search facility.
- 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.
Want to Know More?
- Samples of The Website Utility's
JavaScript search engines are available for a number of websites.
- Search Brettb.com using the JavaScript
search engine - notice how the search engine has been adapted to fit in with the
website's design (this is a simple 1 hour job!). Also compare the search results it
returns with those from the much more complicated to set up Index Server/ASP powered search
facility.
- If you want to try The Website Utility's JavaScript 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.
- A JavaScript search engine has obvious limitations and isn't really suitable for
websites with 1000's of pages, so you may be interested in the Index Server Companion, which allows Microsoft Index Server to index websites on remote
websites. Alternatively The Website Utility also creates an ASP server-side search engine,
which requires less content to be downloaded to the client's web browser.
Download
The Website Utility Evaluation Version (3Mb ZIP file).
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