free search engine

Search Network Free Search Engine

Update – 7/28/2012: Apparently the SearchNetworkHQ.com now forwards to the MySEOTool website.

Search Network has figured out a pretty good angle on the whole free software thing. They have built a search engine script that is completely free to download so you’re able to either add search functionality to your site or (I’m assuming) you can run it as a stand alone search engine as well, customizing it however you choose.

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This is how I understand their operation from the rather skimpy documentation on the site. You download and install their free software to run your own search engine on your domain. Your search results (no idea if your results are urls added by you or if its a feed) display ads that Search Network has sold and if any sales are made through your site, you earn 20% of the sale. I’m not sure if you can sell your own advertising in addition to theirs, but something tells me you cannot.

This affiliate program sounds like it definitely benefits Search Network a lot more than the person running the individual search engine. By giving away this software, they are creating a massive sales force to display all the ads they sell for a monthly fee starting at $59 a month. On top of the monthly income, I’d have to surmise they receive a portion of the affiliate profits as well.

It might be ideal for someone wanting to add a search to his site and maybe make a few bucks in the process, but for someone serious about creating his own search engine and earning money from advertising, I believe it would be much better to go with a platform where you have more control over the ads.

There’s a tons of commercial search engines out there to choose from and a few free ones as well. By going with another script, you won’t have that network of built in advertisers that the Search Network has created for you, but you will definitely have more control over your ads. This translates to higher earnings down the road when you are able to obtain your own site advertisers.

Perhaps there’s a lot more to it that I’m missing, but if that’s the case, there really should be some additional documentation on the website to explain how everything works in detail. The way it looks from where I’m sitting, it looks like a pass, but I’ve also been spoiled by both free and easy with Sphider.

Sphider Search Engine Software

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Sphider is a PHP search engine that you can either add to your existing site or use as a stand alone search engine. It’s small, easy to install, and not complicated at all to set up. I have probably spent more time with this script than most of the others out there because I still run a site that uses Sphider. I started out using a pay per click search engine in 2004 with a commercial script called Smarter Scripts, and in 2007 I moved to Sphider and I like it so much more.

The best part about Sphider is that it’s a real search engine that will index whatever sites you choose. Some of the commercial options out there are nothing more than feed engines instead of true search engines. You borrow and display the search results from Google, MSN, and DMOZ and perhaps some affiliate feeds like RevenuePilot and Searchfeed to hopefully make a few dollars here and there, but none of it is your own. Sphider give you greater control over your database by allowing you to approve or deny which sites are allowed.

It has some standard settings you would expect such as results per page, minimum word length in order to be indexed, or required number of words on a page for it to be indexed. Then there’s a couple other simply yet effective ones that I particularly like such as the Sphider Suggest feature that will pop up a number of related keywords as you type your search phrase. There is also a small section called Weights in which you can select how important search aspects are in your search results. For example, if you felt that the most important keywords are found in the title of a web page, you can set the weight of words in web page titles to be very high. This would give precedence to those sites when a keyword or phrase was searched for that matched it’s page title.

There’s a statistics section for you to find your top keywords, most popular searches, number of sites, largest indexed pages and more. I personally like to view the searches people perform and also monitor the time it takes to kick out the results. I did notice that if the results show that there were zero pages returned, it takes a very long time. I’m not a database guy so I’m not sure, but perhaps it’s because it’s searching the entire database and still coming up empty. Regardless, I’m still very happy with my Sphider site and continue to add to it all the time.

There might be prettier search sites out there since Sphider is pretty stripped down, but I like a lot of white space. I’d rather figure out how to add or change something than how to remove it entirely. This search software is ridiculously simple to learn and the possibilities of niche search site implementation is virtually endless. If you’ve ever considered organizing all your favorite bookmarks for that hobby of yours and offering them to the public, a Sphider search engine is your perfect solution.