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At this point, you'd have a big project on your hands if you decided to write<br />
your site's search engine yourself. It's much better to take an existing, open<br />
source solution written in whatever language your site runs on, and then<br />
adapt it to your own purposes in whatever way you need to. Good places to<br />
look for open source site search software are sourceforge.net, which allow<br />
you to search by language and sort results by the popularity of the software.<br />
Outsourcing Search.<br />
Finally, if you don't want to go to too much trouble with your site search, you<br />
might consider outsourcing it altogether: that is, making your search box<br />
send the user to the search results for your site at an external search engine.<br />
More and more sites with outdated or useless search engines are starting to<br />
do this, realizing that they're putting off users by forcing them to use bad<br />
search engines.<br />
If you want to offer a Google search for your website, go here:<br />
https://www.google.com/cse/all. Yahoo and MSN offer similar services, but<br />
they're nowhere near as popular. You should really only consider<br />
outsourcing your search as a last result, as it looks amateurish unless you<br />
pay to customize it with your logo and design, and it may also have the<br />
unintentional result of sending your visitors back out onto the web instead<br />
of keeping them on your site. Still, if you really don't have the time to spare<br />
to make a good search, it can be a useful alternative to have.<br />
Chapter 34: Time for User Testing.<br />
In software development, testing is a key word. Everything that gets<br />
developed gets put in front of the testers and used in every possible way.<br />
They send back bugs to the developers, who start fixing them, and on it goes<br />
until the deadline hits and the product has to ship.<br />
For websites, though, things just aren't done this way. Many websites are<br />
always under development, and have typically only been tested by the<br />
person who designed them, and perhaps a random friend or two. Not only<br />
are bugs and problems not fixed, but most of them are never even found.<br />
What I'm telling you, though, is that websites aren't immune from user<br />
testing: in fact, they can give you the advantage you need out there.<br />
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |142
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