Introduction

The JavaScript Search Engine is a free tool for client side website indexing.  It lets you provide search facilities for the whole of your website independently of the web server.

It can be configured to return results in many different formats.

To see how well the search engine works go to the Example Site where you can search the text of some classics poems.

Server Side vs. Client Side Search Engines

Server side search engines such as AltaVista are very useful in many situations.  However people often wish to be able to search actual sites and not the whole Internet.  This is not usually possible for smaller websites:

• You can provide search server side facilities if you have cgi scripting permission.  However this is usually expensive and inevitably complex.

• Microsoft FrontPage provides built in "Search Bots" to provide search facilities. This only works if your Internet Provider is running FrontPage extensions on their server.  Very few are for security reasons.

• You can use a global search engine to provide search facilities on your site.  However most engines will only index a small part of a site and all are very slow at updating the indexed content.

JavaScript Search Engine overcomes these problems by running a JavaScript program on the browser's computer within a web page.  The major caveat of this is that the website index must be downloaded before a search can occur.  The larger the web site the larger the index!

However for small to medium web sites of less than 50 pages the Search Engine is an ideal tool for allowing customers, surfers and browsers access to the information they want from your site.

Offline Searching

The engine can also be used for offline searching.  For example you may wish to write a CD containing html files with an index.  Alternatively you could index html pages on your hard disk.

Compatibility

The JavaScript Search Engine works equally well in Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Using the Engine on your site

The JavaScript Search Engine is free for all use.  To use it on your website you must Create an Index and add it to the Template search.html file.  You should have little problem doing this if you are confident using HTML.

Please read the Conditions of Use Policy before implementing it on your site.

If you are interested how the technology behind the engine works I have provided commented Source Code Notes.