Searching a Web Site

Visitors choose search to navigate your Web site more frequently than any other navigation option. Search usage often exceeds links, menus, or site maps. This is especially true when visitors have a term or phrase already in mind. Advanced visitors may narrow down their search results by adding special terms or query strings.

As an administrator or developer, you want to provide the optimum search results quickly, with the most relevant results near the top. To accomplish this, adjust the search engine results by setting synonyms, suggested results, and keywords.

In some cases, you can anticipate what the visitor is looking for and provide a convenient way for them to see results from the click of a button or image. To do this, developers can create automated queries that provide the unique combination of keywords and terms that provide results that are highly targeted to the visitor's quest. These queries are found in the code-behind and use the search API.

The Web site search should provide a simple user interface and relevant results. The Web Search server controls let your visitors perform basic and advanced searches, and filter results.

This section also contains the following topics.

Basic versus Advanced Web Site Search

Installing the Visio IFilter

Searching for Metadata

Synonym Sets