The Atomz website search engine

August 9 2001

Pandia takes a look at Atomz, a service that provides webmasters with a free website search engine.

You do not have to agree with everything the Web usability guru Jacob Nielsen has to say, but he does provide some interesting information.

In his book Designing Web Usability, for instance, he points out that slightly more than half of his tested users are "search dominant", meaning that they will usually go straight for the search button when they enter a website. In contrast link dominant prefer to follow the links around the site, before using the available search engine.

Hence it makes very much sense to provide your site's visitors with a website search engine, i.e. a search facility that makes it possible to search the site for relevant information. This is especially important when the site reaches as certain size, containing more than -- let's say -- some 50 pages.

You can do this the hard way or the easy way, all depending on the size of the site and the size of the traffic.

The hard way

The hard way is installing your own search software, normally some kind of CGI-script that builds a database by searching your directory structure or by "spidering" your web pages like a regular search engine robot.

This is often the best option for huge corporate sites containing thousands of pages or databases containing huge lists of products. There are many different solutions on the market, and if this is what interests you you should spend some time exploring the SearchTools site, which contains much information on search tools for websites, intranets and portals.

You should set the same standards for ranking and relevance as you would for any regular search engine. There is no point having an online search engine if it does not provide your visitors with the information they need. If you are selling goods, irrelevant results may actually lead to bankruptcy. If your visitors cannot find what they are looking for, they are just a couple of clicks away from your competitor. This is definitely the stuff that feeds sleepless nights.

The easy way

Yes, we hear you, you know zip about CGI, Perl, Java, and SQL. You want to hear about the easy way.

The easy way could be described by the popular word "outsourcing". You let someone else build the search database and the search forms for you. And when you're at it, you might as well let this friendly party host your search engine as well. The website search engine will not burden your own server, and you don't have to worry about obscure UNIX and SQL commands. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

It gets better. There are actually companies that are willing to this for free. Moreover, they will provide you with templates that make the search result pages indistinguishable from your regular webpages. Your visitors won't notice that they have actually left your site.

Some of these providers will add some banners to the result pages to cover their expenses. One of them, however, will add nothing but a small company logo. That's Atomz, probably the most popular player in this field.

Atomz has more than 40,000 customers in more than 100 countries. In February 2001 alone, Atomz served more than 30 million searches across their network. Media Metrix, a well known Internet measurement company, reports that Atomz is one of the 250 most visited sites in the world.

Ranking

Webpage ranking is based on how often the search query keyword are present in various parts in the webpage. In this respect Atomz is similar to global search engines like AltaVista or Google.

However, as a webmaster you are allowed to fine-tune this search algorithm, deciding, for instance, that the title-field is to be given much more weight than text found in the body-text of the webpages.

The webpage fields supported are a special Atomz target meta rag, the body text, alt image text, the title field, the description meta tag, the keywords meta tag and the URL. However, you may just as well leave the default algorithm alone. It works fine.

Logs

You can learn a lot about your visitors from studying your server logs. Atomz gives you additional information, as it lists the queries users are entering when searching your site. In this way you learn a lot about the interests of your visitors.

Maybe its time you added another article answering some of their questions? You may also discover holes in your product line.

Atomz Express Search

There are three different versions of the Atomz website search engine. Atomz Express Search is for individual or personal Web sites. It is free for sites with less than 500 pages.

You will be provided with the HTML-code for search forms, including one for advanced searching. The advanced search form is based on pull down menus and allows limited AND, OR and phrase searching. You may limit searches by date.

Atomz argues that it can added to any website in five minutes or less, without the need for any additional hardware or software. Probably, if you use one of the default templates. If you want to integrate the result pages into your own sites look and feel, you will probably need an hour. But that's not much either.

You may update the search engine index whenever needed, or rebuild the index automatically on a weekly basis.The Atomz search engine supports the most popular file formats, including HTML, PDF, Flash, plain text-files and music MP3 files.

Atomz Prime Search

Atomz Prime Search is for small and medium sized enterprises. You get all the features listed under Atomz Express Search, However, you may choose daily automatic updates of the index, and get unlimited technical email support. Atomz will leave out the Atomz logo. Prices vary form USD 100 to 600 according to the number of pages. There is also a special Enterprise solution for larger companies.

Pandia's test

Pandia has used the free Atomz Express Search for quite some time now, and has found the service very reliable. It is easy to administer, as you are using Web based control panels. An additional bonus we have found very useful is that it will report any dead links pointing to other parts of your site.

We like the possibility to adjust the search engine algorithm, and don't really mind the Atomz logo.

We do wish it would be possible to ask the search engine to include the metatag description in the results, though. As it is now, it will pick out what it thinks is relevant sentences from the webpage itself. This may in some cases be keywords found in content lists, menus etc., which is not that useful. By using a very descriptive webpage title, however, you may get around this problem.

According to Jacob Nielsen, search should be available on every single page of a site. In an ideal world that should indeed be so. We have found, however, that too many visitors mix the Atoms search form with our form for searching the whole Web. To avoid such confusion, we have put the Atomz search form on a separate page. Please feel free to try it out at this page.