Features

To add a search function to your website, you can install a utility on your web server that indexes your webpages and processes any search requests. Microsft's IIS, the web server included with Windows XP Professional Edition, can do this. If you use a commercial web host, however, you may have to pay to have a search tool added to your site. A good way around this is to use Google's free Custom Search Engine on your own website.

To do this, you must first sign up for an email account with Google. This is called Gmail, also known as GoogleMail in the UK. Once you have Gmail, go to the main Google search page and click on the word 'more', to the right of the search box. Under Explore and innovate, click on Custom Search Engines next to the word heading Co-op. On the next screen click Create Search Engine. Follow the wizard to the end, entering your site's URL when it asks you which sites you want your Custom Search Engine to search.

When you've finished, return to your Google Account homepage and click on My Search Engines. For the search engine you created, click on Control Panel and then, from the list along the top of the page, on Code. Copy and paste the HTML code you find in the next screen into your website's code, and this will add Google's search facility to your website.

	1 As well as adding search functions to your website, Google Custom Search is a nice tool to use in its own right. You could create several Custom Search boxes, each of which searches a number of your favourite websites grouped by category. Paste the code for these into an HTML document that sits on your hard disk, then make that document your browser homepage.