Although running your search engine from a remote site takes a lot of the burden off of your shoulders, you still need to keep tabs on it. Make regular checks to make sure that the search server is still up and available. You should also keep your search form and results page current by updating them to match any site design changes.
Similarly, you'll need to keep your search engine up to date with any content changes by running regular indexes. The interval between index checks depends on how often you change your data: Sites that are constantly adding information may need very frequent index updates, while slower-moving sites could have weekly or even monthly ones. All the remote site search services let you log in and update your site manually, although they may have limits on the frequency.
Your last task can be a great help to you: going through the search log. By examining the search requests of your users, you'll learn a great deal about what people want from your site — often much more than any focus group can tell you. If you have a music site and notice that suddenly everyone's searching for MP3, you can add an MP3 section to your site to quickly get people where they want to go.
And that's about it. The next page includes a summary of the nine most popular remote site search services, including where to get them and how much they cost. Try a few out and you'll see that they can help you get your users to the information they want quickly and efficiently.
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