Search forms are the user interface of the search engine. You can make a very simple form with just a text field and a button and put it in the navigation section of all your pages (like We do), or you can make a search page and add a link to it in your navigation. In either case, search should be no more than one click away or you're wasting its potential.
Advanced search capabilities can be worth adding. While many services find that only about 3 percent of their searchers take advantage of these options, the people who use them really appreciate the control. These power users are often unofficial evangelists for a site, encouraging others to visit and freely criticizing any missing features. An advanced search page with options for phrases, multiple fields, special collections or zones ("marketing" vs. "support," for example), and date ranges (such as "last week" and "last month") allows them to perform more precise searches.
Searching comes in two basic flavors. There are engines that assume you only want pages that have all the desired keywords, and there are those that provide pages that have any of the keywords. All else being equal, this feature will control how many matches the search engine finds for any particular search. Not every search service lets users select which flavor they want, so be sure to double-check your service if this element is important to you.
Some search engines can also match extended characters, such as those in "déjà," "søk," and "straße," while others cannot. If there are a lot of these special characters on your site, make sure that your search tool will be able to find them.
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