by Stephanie Poll

Maybe you have seen it before. That little search box, probably located on the homepage of some website you were just looking at. It’s called a Google search box, and no, Google did not put it there. More than likely, the webmaster of that site added it to the website. Lots of webmasters today are adding Google search boxes to their sites. Why? Because it is easy, and it adds a great feature to the site. Not only can it provide for searching Google directly from the website, but it could also let users search within the site they are looking through at that precise moment.

Google’s main program for adding a search box is called Google Free, and it comes with several variations, including the basic web search, a web search with SafeSearch filtering, and a web search with site search added.

Google Free web search: the most basic of web searches available. It simply allows the site-viewer to search the web through your website.

Google Free SafeSearch: this feature is for users who would like to be able to filter their search results. SafeSearch will screen for any explicit content and delete it from the results.

Google Free web search with Site Search: the same as the first option with the addition of using Google’s search technology to search your own website.

Implementing this feature is as simple as copying and pasting some HTML code into the page on which you want your Google search box to appear. Check out this website: http://www.google.com/searchcode.html . Click on ‘Get the Free search code,’ and locate the code you need according to which search option you would like to use.

If you are interested in making your searches more customizable (for instance, including your company logo at the top of the search results page), this can be done by tweaking the HTML code just a bit. Simply check out this site for a step-by-step process of how to do so: http://www.google.com/services/free.html .

Whether you want the most basic of Google search options or something that can be more customizable to your own website, Google has the features to do so.

For more learning and tutorials about adding a search box to your website, check out these helpful sites:

http://www.7gen.com/node/1126

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_add_a_google_search_box_to_my_web_site.html