A website with 20 or 30 products is usually accessible enough to work well without a search facility, but when your products database (or other database of items) reaches 100+, a search engine becomes a must. (Note, this type of search engine is not to be confused with search engines such as Yahoo and Google which help you find websites).

Our approach to developing a search engine is that it should be unique to your website. Afterall, the job of the search engine is to help your users find meaningful and relevent information, so we consider that a "one size fits all" search engine is a very blunt instrument in this respect. For example, if you're selling Hi-Fi, your customers might want to specify a price range, whereas if your customers are searching for flights, they may wish to specify a maximum number of changes to get to their destination.

A good example of one of our search engines is the one we constructed for Sony recording artists REO Speedwagon. It can be found at www.speedwagon.com.

Website search engines is a big topic, but for starters, the two main things which a search engine can do wrong is to provide either too much information, or too little information. This is something which is a function of the number of items which are being searched, and therefore may need to change as your website's database grows in size. For instance, if you're searching a database of 200 books, typing in the author and/or title may be sufficient to give a good result, whereas if the database is 200,000 books, typing in the publisher, year of publication or ISBN number would be of great benefit.