- The user may not know how to find the content with conventional navigation
- The user may look for terms they are familiar with, when the website uses propietary terms or special product names
- The website navigation may be poorly designed
There are several different ways to incorporate a search engine in a website. The size of your website will often determine the type needed. Fortunately, several of the options are low cost. The most economical is using an actual search engine, like Google or Yahoo to spider (follow links and record their location) your site, then display only those results when someone searches your site.
For sites that store content and information in a database, querying, or searching the database will allow a user to find virtually all content on a site.
Another option is an enterprise search solution such as Autonomy or Google's Enterprise Search. These are usually very effective, but the cost often outweighs the benefits for some.
