Add a Search box (content hub) for my website?

[AutoEurope]

Hello

We would like to introduce a search area in our website, to help our users to find all information regarding a specific topic (landing pages, infographics, blogs, videos, etc...).

Before we decide to build everything internally, we were wondering if there is any widget or plugging to make this in a smooth way and that works fine.

I have also seen that Google offers a custom search option to make this happens.

I would really appreciate advice about what to do regarding this topic:

Is there any company that offers a really good solution for this? Is worth to use Google custom search option? Or the best option is build it internally?

PS: I have seen that there are many plugins for wordpress, but our site is not a wordpress blog. Just to clarify.

Many thanks for your help

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Niall,

we were wondering if there is any widget or plugging to make this in a smooth way and that works fine

What is it powering the site then? Drupal? Joomla? Or is it just good old HTML?

If you are looking for a way that works, then there is no reason not to use Google - after all, they are the search masters. This would be a fairly quick and easy way to get a search function working with no cost other than a bit of time, if you go for the free version that is. However, if you are looking for something more custom, then you would really need to talk to a developer who can do this for you.

How big is the site?

More reading here...

https://cse.google.co.uk/cse/

-Andy

[AutoEurope]

Hi Andy

Thanks for your answer.

The website is html, no wordpress, wix or cms like these ones.

Actually if we implement it, we would do it for our 23 european sites. Each site is different but one of the big ones could have around 3.000 pages.

If we go for Google custom search, we would choose the paid version as for sure it has more option to customize.

Just wondering if there is any tool/company offering a solution for this; if not we would develop it internally but the project will need more time to go live.

Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Niall,

I don't know of any companies who would specialise in this, but pretty much any developer could undertake it for you. I am also sure that you would need the paid version.

Where are you based? I'll see if there is anyone I know.

-Andy

[AutoEurope]

Hi Andy

We are based in Munich, but we have our own developers team.

But at the moment they are working in other projects and we were looking for an alternative solution.

Thanks anyway

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No problem Niall.

I hope you get everything sorted soon

-Andy

[KaneJamison]

Google custom search will definitely be the easiest way to do this. If your content was stored in a database then there would be more options you could use to search it, but I'd still expect users to get better results from Google's option since it will be smarter at basic search functionality.

[AutoEurope]

Hi Kane

Thanks for you answer

Is what I think; I dont think that we will find nothing better than Google; but of course the free version is a bit limited and the extended one is around 2 grand a year.

By the way, you heard about Scoop.it? They do widgets for wordpress but also offers solutions for html sites.

Thanks

[KaneJamison]

I haven't paid for Google Custom Search engines in the past, but depending on your traffic, your search units may be far less than expected. We see plenty of large sites (thousands of pages+, millions of visits) that see less than 0.1% of their pageviews from searches. If you're starting the search feature from scratch, I wouldn't assume from the start that you're going to need to pay the $2000 rate.

Scoop.it is a bit more like Pinterest or Delicious. You can post stuff to your Scoop.it account, but it's probably not going to be a good solution for searching a website.