Yahoo! Hacks

Search Your Web Site with Yahoo!

Offer your readers a way to search your site—without hiring a team of developers to build it.

As a serious web addict, I’m frequently frustrated by sites that don’t offer a way to search their content. Navigating through a maze of different sections, trying to find that one piece of information I’m after feels like a waste of time. Often I’m forced to leave the site, bring up Yahoo! Web Search, and use its site: meta keyword. The site: shortcut lets you specify that the search results should be limited to a single domain.

For example, if you browse to mountaindew.com, you’re immediately blasted with metal music and an extreme Flash animation showing various extreme sports. But all I’m after is the number of calories in a can of soda, and there’s not a search form in sight. I could try clicking on a few of the menu items, but I’d probably find more images of skateboarding than useful information. So I surf over to Yahoo! and type:

	site:mountaindew.com calories

In a few seconds, I have a specific link deep within the mountaindew.com site that has the information I’m after, as shown in Figure 6-3.

Figure 6-3. Search results for “calories” limited to mountaindew.com

PepsiCo, Inc. (the owners and operators of http://www.mountaindew.com) probably has the budget and team of developers to build its own search engine for the site if it wanted to. But many individuals ...