Something for your toolbox

**Cloud** · 25 April 2014, 07:48 PM

I know that many of the people on this forum have wanted xara to create some sort of search widget for websites, now due to many things such as having to index a site and put the results on a server etc etc. it can get complicated. There have been a number of options used, such as of course google's own search widget, but that takes your site visitor to googles search engine, then there are actual software solutions which index your site then you have to upload it to your server and then add lots of code in the head text then some other code in the body text, so on and so forth, and you just end up with a not very good looking search results page.

I was checking out a resource for adobe muse and came across a widget for muse which uses a service which will index your site, store the information on their cloud servers and then give you some short code to paste into your site where you want the search box. The best thing about it is that it opens a pop-up within your site listing the search results, it is amazingly fast and will start to show results on the fly, just type the first letter and the results start to appear. It even has a built in analytics tool to show you what people are searching for and what they click on etc (with the free option it is limited to the last 30 days, but that is good enough).

The best thing is that it is free for anything upto 500 pages, now if you have anywhere more than that many pages then you should not be using xara webdesigner. They have of course implemented it on their site (top right) so you can see how fast it is)

I have seen the widget in action but not had a chance to use it yet so maybe anyone who does will kindly display the results.

http://www.addsearch.com/

**gwpriester** · 26 April 2014, 12:47 AM

Looks interesting. Thanks Sketch.

**Boy** · 26 April 2014, 04:55 PM

Thank you! Looks good.

**gwpriester** · 26 April 2014, 05:41 PM

I might be missing something and I have sent them a message.

I copied the code and created a search for this page www.PlacitasArtists.com but it does not do a very good job of searching. For example, if you search for Sal Gullo who is mentioned on the first page, you get two unrelated results.

I must be doing something wrong.

**Cloud** · 26 April 2014, 07:29 PM

I'll have to set this up and check it out to see what may be hindering the search, maybe the site has not been indexed fully or there may be a conflict with some other code.

**gwpriester** · 26 April 2014, 11:20 PM

There is a Flash slide show to the right. I also used the demo they e-mailed me and it does the same thing.

I'll let you know when I hear back.

**richinri** · 27 April 2014, 08:00 AM

There are ways to add google search to your site for no charge.

**gwpriester** · 30 April 2014, 12:24 PM

Sketch - Here is what I heard back from AddSearch (and now the search is working)

The reason why some pages such as Sal Gullo's weren't indexed was our default heuristic we use that ignores pages that have very few outgoing links, as in many cases these are error pages or the like that should not appear in the search. I've disabled this heuristic for your site, and your example queries now return at least some results.

It seems odd that this would not be a webmaster option however. I suggested to the team that they make this option available.

**Cloud** · 30 April 2014, 12:59 PM

That is odd that they would do that, but I guess for a free option it's still not bad and good to know that there is a way around it, still not got around to testing it yet. I'll make the same suggestion and hopefully they take it up because I'm sure that you'll agree that this is a very nice tool.