custom search for non-profit sites?
Just thought I’d post what I found out about coming up with a solution for a non-profit organisation for a custom site search engine. For example if you want users to obtain an accurate set of results of pages from your site.
the Google service provided for this is pretty good, and would seem to work well on the few sites I checked. The only thing you need to be sure of is the terms and conditions. With a non-profit these are pretty fair - the ads can be turned off and you can style the results page to get the look and feel of your site. So a professional search in look and exceution can be cooked up in a few minutes. The labels feature si pretty cool too, so you can guide users to content better.
The only thing I found a stumbling block is the look of the little search box itself, although it is a small price to pay I suppose. The minimium width for this will be 120px if you want the watermarked version or smaller if you are prepared to ahve the Google logo sit outside the box. The latter option is a bit off-putting though I feel.
You can read more about this http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/ui.html
The support search forum has changed now - so make sure you look at the current one: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/customsearch?hl=en&start=40
I also looked at RollYo and Yahoo BOSS search / custom search but these didn’t seem to do what I Wanted - a search for a specific site, by using the already spidered pages.
any advice/comments ?
Luke