Site search

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The site search is an internal search engine on Internet sites , which is intended to make it easier for the visitor to find information (an article).

method

The searcher enters his desired search term in a form field and the internal search engine shows the user the results in a list. The display of the search results can look different. The most popular formatting includes the following elements:

  • Title or heading,
  • Text excerpt with highlighted search term (s),
  • Link to the article.

Clicking on one of the result links takes you to the desired article.

Indexed database search

All text-based content is indexed in a database (e.g. MySql). The basis for this is a content management system (CMS) or a script (e.g. PHP or ASP), which saves the text content in a database and assigns it to the respective pages, i.e. indexes it. All irrelevant words (e.g. and, or, as, also) are kept in a so-called " blacklist " and excluded from the indexing. With the search query, a database query is initiated using "SELECT * FROM table name search WHERE LIKE ("% search term% ")", which searches the database table for the term entered and sorts it in descending order according to the number of terms found per page.

Options

Full text search

With the (full) text search, the search term is read from an unstructured, continuous text file (HTML file) and this is displayed.

Multiple search terms

A distinction is made between an "AND search" and an "OR search (OR)". With the "And search" only articles are found if all search terms result in a hit (eg: with "red white" only the article is found in which both terms are found). In contrast, the "or search" finds every article that contains at least one of the terms.

Other search functions

To make it as easy as possible for the website user to find an article, some websites have target group-oriented search functions such as B. a search for colors or color moods. This facilitates z. B. Users of online shops to find an item according to the desired color. This so-called metadata is not stored in the text or in the description, but is assigned individually to each article by the shop operator. Another area of ​​application is the search for "smells" or "flavors".

Tools for the home user

There are a number of free scripts for private homepages that can be easily integrated into your website. There are many useful links on Google .