How to build a custom search for your website without coding

In this article, we will see how to build a custom search engine for your website. Expertrec custom search engine works on all websites.

What is a custom search engine?

A custom search engine crawls and indexes pages of your website and enables a search box on your website that. It also gives you options to fix the search relevance/logic and look and feel.

Here are functions fulfilled by the custom search engine.

1. Crawls and indexes your website content.
2. Adds a search box to your website.
3. Let’s you edit the search relevance/ logic.
4. Let’s edit the look and feel of the search engine.

Here are

Steps to create a custom search engine using expertrec.

1. Prerequisites-
   1. Your site should be live. (not in staging or localhost etc).
   2. Make sure your site is not behind a login ( for creating a search on behind login pages, refer to this article- https://blog.expertrec.com/crawling-behind-login-authenticated-pages/
   3. Have a working sitemap (increases success of indexing all pages. You can create a free sitemap using options in this article https://blog.expertrec.com/free-tools-for-creating-sitemap/)
2. Go to https://cse.expertrec.com/?platform=cse
3. Enter your website URL.
4. Enter your sitemap URL.
5. Choose your nearest data-center. (ideally a region close to you)
6. Wait for the crawl to complete (this could take more time (5 minutes to a day) based on the number of pages on your site).
7. Test the demo of your search engine.
8. Contact support if you need any help from here.
9. Add code to your website.
10. Usually, the code is in the below format – replace api_key with your API key.

    <ci-search></ci-search>
    <script>
    (function() {
    var id = 'api_key';
    var ci_search = document.createElement('script');
    ci_search.type = 'text/javascript';
    ci_search.async = true;
    ci_search.src = 'https://cse.expertrec.com/api/js/ci_common.js?id=' + id;
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(ci_search, s);
    })();
    </script>

     

11. If you need help, email the code to your developer or webmaster.
12. You can use the control panel to edit the look, feel, and relevance of the search engine.
13. Take live.
14. Upgrade to a paid plan. Pricing plans here- (https://www.expertrec.com/#pricing)

Add Custom Search to your website