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A Free and Simple Way to Add a Site Search to Your Own Web Site So Visitors Can Search Your Own Web Site Easily

by Alyssa Rice

What do half of all web page visitors do immediately when they get to your web site?

In an article from Cludo, they state 50% of users go directly to the search bar as soon as they arrive on a website.

Internal searches have become more prevalent than ever. This statistic is why YOU need a search bar! Adding a search bar on your own web site is the best way to prevent losing new and returning customers, and help web site visitors search your own web site.

Free and Simple Way to Add Search (Site-search) to Your Website

The technical team at Net Atlantic researched all the various search tools available to put on your own web site (that searches your own web site). Lots of them either cost money, display advertising, show links to competitors, take you away from your web site, or do other unwanted sneaky behavior. After checking them all out, Bing Custom Search powered by Microsoft Azure came out as the clear winner!

Matt Sambito, technical lead for the project, explained his findings. “The Azure Bing Search is a superior solution, for many reasons. For one, it allows you to customize and prioritize the keyword search for your site based on consumer behavior.”

The Bing Custom Site Search solution runs on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, one of the top three cloud solutions. (Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) being the other two competitors).

And although Amazon Web Services is the leader in cloud services with the largest market share, the Net Atlantic team came away thoroughly impressed with the Microsoft solution.

Matt Sambito describes the simple process of putting Bing Custom Site Search onto your web site:

  1. Go to Microsoft and set up a free Azure account https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/
  2. Set up Microsoft Index in Azure
  3. Use code that Microsoft provides to you
  4. Upload it to your site
  5. Create a search bar, search page, search code, or search HTML for your web site
  6. Azure identifies on topic sites from the World Wide Web
  7. Azure applies and adjusts the Bing ranker
  8. Customize your search results and rankings based on your business’ needs

Bing Custom Search opens up many possibilities. It allows you to select certain parts of the web that you want to search and control the ranking when searching. This search is ad-free, no matter what. This feature also provides you API access to your search results, which will give your business valuable insights.

Learn more about Bing Custom Search and how it all works.
Learn how to set up and install Bing Custom Search which will do a site-search for your own site.
To see the free Bing site-search tool in action, try out the implementation on the Net Atlantic web site search tool. It’s located in the top dark blue bar on the right side at https://www.netatlantic.com

Note: Make sure to consult with your company marketing and IT teams before installing this. Microsoft might not be the best search tool for every company. What application does your company use for the search bar?