Once the engine gets a bunch of matches, it has to sort them in some way. The classic solution is called relevance ranking and involves using a fairly complex equation to decide whether a page is more relevant to your search than another page. Unfortunately, some of these algorithms are not very good, so when you search for several words at once, you might find that the top-ranked pages are missing one or two of the search terms! Site visitors are impatient; if they don't see useful results at the top, they'll bail out of the site. So be sure you're happy with your search engine and test it thoroughly with your specific data.
For a polished, professional look, the results page should look and feel like the rest of your site. This includes colors, background graphics, navigational bars, and everything else. You want searchers to remember what site they're on and what their options are. Most search services let you modify their results page to match your look.
You also want to be able to configure what information is displayed on the results page. Most of us are used to the results from Web-wide search engines, but each of them varies a bit. Sometimes the entire URL is shown (which can potentially be cryptic and unhelpful to searchers), sometimes it's just the title of the page. Most display how many matches were found and how many pages of results you have to sift through, but some search tools let you get a little fancier; they'll show the file size of each page, the date it was last modified, the first few lines of text from each page, information pulled from the meta description tags, and more. Decide which data your users will find most useful and go with the search service that can include all the necessary information.
Most of these services will index small sites for free, though many of them will display banner advertising or the service logo on the search results page. If you want to avoid the ads and logos, index larger sites, or get more options, you can usually upgrade to a paid service.
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