If you’ve got more than a few products on your website, you’re probably going to want to make your website searchable. A site search is valuable for two reasons:

1. It helps customers quickly find what they want.

2. It can be a form of market research. (With a little programming, you can set up your site to record all the searches, and then you’ll know what customers were looking for. This can help you improve your SEO and drive the direction of your product offerings!)

So how can you add a site search to your website?

1. For the Not-So-Technically Inclined
Your shopping cart may have a built in search function. If it does, huzzah! You probably already have some form of site search. If it doesn’t, another option is Google.

If you’re cheap/broke, you can put a Google search box on your site for FREE. The catch is that your free search results will display Google Adwords. This could be bad news. Imagine you sell jewelry and your customer types “handmade silver jewelry” in your search box. Now your competitors’ ads are showing up on your website. Yikes!

If you’re willing to spend a little cash, you can solve this problem with Google Site Search. Starting at $100 per year, you can have the power of Google’s search on your website, with no ads.

Pros & Cons: The built-in search from your cart or Google solution is an easy one to implement. It’s also cheap or free, depending on which option you choose.

The downside is you have less control. You may not be able to track phrases searched. You may not be able to build some smarts into your search engine that apply specifically to your website.

2. For the Moderately-Technically-Inclined and Moderately Lazy/Cheap
Chances are you can find an open source search engine to install on your website. You’ll need a little technical know-how to do this, but it’s easier than creating an entire search engine from scratch. Here’s a list of some free open source search engines for PHP. With a little Google research you can probably find other options like these.

Pros & Cons: Open source code is free and you can even modify it to do things you’d like it to do. (Such as recording your search phrases.) It’s less work than writing your own search tool, but you’ll  need some tech savvy to get set up. It will probably also take a little more effort than something as quick as Google Site Search.

3. For the Technically Inclined/Those With Deep Pockets
For ultimate control of your search feature, you can always write your own search tool. (Or hire someone to write a search tool for you.)  This is a solution more commonly seen with bigger companies, but if you have the means/skills and you want the most control, you can certainly write a search tool.

This is actually the route I ended up going for my own website. I went this route because I wanted my search tool to:

• Intelligently interpret product types (i.e. It understands that “womens tshirt” and “ladies tshirt” mean the same thing)
• Intelligently understand colors (i.e. It understands that purple and maroon and lilac mean the same thing as far as my product colors are concerned)
• Work with tags (i.e. if a user searches for a forest t-shirt, I want the results to include all tees that are tagged with the word forest. My tagging system allows my search results to take into account user intent instead of just the words in product titles and product descriptions)
• Record searches so I can improve upon my search tool, improve my SEO and get new product ideas.

Pros & Cons: Creating your own search tool is going to require considerable technical skills or the funds to hire a programmer. Either route will require some time to gather requirements and write the code. The nice thing about this DIY route is that you get exactly what you want. You can build the search that’s best for your products and website.

Note: One last option to consider is a premium search tool like SiteSearch Pro, Nextopia or PicoSearch. These solutions are somewhere between the options I describe above.

You’re using a pre-built search tool so it may not do every little thing you want, but it does come with pretty sophisticated capabilities and also probably comes with support to get you set up, which is great if you’re not super tech-savvy.