Offering these visitors a site-search utility lets them locate their data right away, without making them click through a tangle of intermediate pages. Helping these visitors find what they're looking for quickly creates the kind of user satisfaction that encourages them to come back and visit your site again. Sounds good, but you can't just tack on site search without considering how it fits within your site's navigational framework. Before you can add search to your site, you need to understand some basic terminology. A search indexer is a program that scans the files in your site and creates an index file, a place that stores all the words on your site in a special format for speedy lookup.
Visitors use a search form to type in search terms and set various search options.
When the user submits the form, a program called a search engine scans the previously created index file for matches to the search terms. Any matches, sometimes called hits, get formatted into an HTML page called the results listing . These results are usually sorted in order of relevance, with the closest matches at the top. Once you're ready to learn how to put search on your site, the first step is to create a search checklist to lay out the various parts of the task ahead. Site-search checklist Avi Rappoport is the principal consultant of Search Tools Consulting .