Wondering how to add search to your website? Building a search engine from scratch may look like an impossible task. While it is not impossible per se, it is still a difficult task and it has associated developer and maintenance costs. However, that is not the only way that you can add search to your website.
Build your own custom search engine
Google Custom Search
Google CSE offers different plans for different business needs as well as lots of customization tools. Being supported by ads, there is a good chance that it will end up showing the ads of even your competitors on your website. Its design limitations, ads, lack of speed made many of former Google search products’ customers look for a better solution.
Google Custom Search allows users to add search to their website quickly without any coding. Google custom search engine uses the regular Google index of your website and uses it to deliver the search results. While the results are decent, you will not be able to meddle with the ranking algorithm or control the indexing of data.
Add Search Function to Website
With hosted search-as-a-service providers taking up the pain of building most of the search engines, the end-users’ role is limited to adding an HTML code snippet on their website to take the search live.
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
Add Search to Website HTML Code
ExpertRec gives a code snippet that you can use to add search to your website.
