Searching Website For Free

joel profile photo

This has been a request over and over for the longest time.



We used to have a free search long time ago when we started, then started charging simply to slow the number of queries down.



We have been reluctant to open it up because the old searching page relies on a query that hammers our server, plus we DO need the revenue.



But so far we are looking to do the following:



1 Allow the user to search the entire website

-Results that will come up include products, articles, forum posts, news.



2 Allow the user to narrow search down to categories:products, articles, forum posts, news.



If you have any suggestions for how the search should be created, used, displayed please let me know by replying back to this post.





Comments(8)

  • d_random6th May, 2008

    Could you put a google search on the site? Would that not take the burden off the server?

  • d_random6th May, 2008

    It would be nice to be able to search by each forum (ie only search Rehab forum) or search select forums all at once (ie Beginners, Property Management, Rehab).

  • joel6th May, 2008

    Good Point.

  • joel7th August, 2008

    Promise kept.

    Sorry for the long time to getting to the feature. But I think now it will help users find what they really need to get to through our 7 years of data.[ Edited by joel on Date 08/07/2008 ]

  • d_random7th August, 2008

    Thank you Joel!
    This is AWESOME!!

  • d_random8th August, 2008

    I can try to help.
    1) Locate the search engine at the top of the web page, looks like this:


    2)Click on the drop down menu to pick which section of the web site you want to search:


    3) I picked to search in "Forums" and I wanted to search for all instances that "REO" was mentioned in posts on the forum, so I typed in "REO" in the search field. Then click the "Search" button.


    4) The search engine processes the request and a new web page should appear (in place of the old one) with all posts with the search word "REO" from the forums:
    [ Edited by d_random on Date 08/08/2008 ]

  • DavidCastle25th June, 2009

    You need to even work for the internal pages for the google to index. This makes easy for every page to appear easily on the google.

  • joel25th June, 2009

    Thanks David,

    We have opened it in the past, but found our website was getting hammered with all the Google traffic rather than legit customers.

    When it comes to having a better experience for our customers or putting our content on the web, we choose the former.


    Quote:
    On 2009-06-25 00:24, DavidCastle wrote:
    You need to even work for the internal pages for the google to index. This makes easy for every page to appear easily on the google.

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