As a compliment to Alex’s presentation on site search optimization at the 2005 Vegas PubCon, I developed a free site search tool called BeyondSiteSearch which allows a webmaster to customize site search results which can help optimize a site’s usability and conversion rate. Considering we’ve had over 800 downloads since the PubCon release, I’d say it’s been filling the niche rather brilliantly so far. Here’s an excerpt of the custom result instructions to give you some idea of how it works:

To create a custom result, click on “Custom Search Results” in the admin menu, then “Create New Custom Result”. Enter the title and URL you wish to appear, and the search terms (separated by commas if you like) which should trigger the display of this custom result. If you have an image you would like to show next to this result, enter the image URL here as well. Hit “Save Changes”. Test your custom result by performing a search, then clicking on your custom result link to register a click in the database.As your site search function gets used, you should periodically check the “Searches with zero results” report to review searches being performed on your site which are not returning standard search results from the index, as these are obviously prime candidates for a customized result.From the admin menu, click on “Statistics” then “Searches with zero results” to see a list of searches which did not return any results.To periodically review the effectiveness of your custom search results, click on “Statistics” from the admin menu then click either “Recent Custom Result Clicks” or “Custom Result Clicks by Keyword”.

As it is still technically in beta and I have not had the time to devote to my ideas for improving the project, I have finally set up a public repository at SourceForge where you can download the beta, report bugs and make feature requests. When i have more time I will add the full source tree to the CVS server for proper management of open-source code submissions. In the meantime, go ahead and download the release and start playing with it right away, and let me know what you think!

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