Site search is important Most internet retailers underestimate the importance of good site search. Some retailers decide that it is so important that they don't even offer a way for searchers to look for products on their site. This is a short-sighted approach to retailing on the internet - statistics show that about 30% of all web purchases are the result of a site search so beefing up your search options can have a considerable impact on your bottom line.

There are many free scripts available online You can find a lot of software solutions that are free or very inexpensive in order to provide site search. These scripts (typically ASP or PHP) usually work fine until a retailer offers about 100 different SKU's. Most of these free scripts either take a database approach where the site search crawls a database looking for a string match or a site-indexer that actually crawls each page on your site much like Google or another search engine would do.

Having more SKU's necessitates better search If you have more than 100 SKU's you will want a professional solution to maximize relevancy for your searchers. If a potential customer finds your site search inadequate they will most likely leave your site and look for a site with decent search functionality.

Google is the leader in search There is no question that Google is the leader in search technology - many small business such as internet retailers are dependent on Google and the other search engines to provide them with the traffic necessary to sustain their business. Google has mastered the process of indexing different pages and determining the relevancy of each page based on a user-defined search.

The Google Mini provides high-caliber search technology at a reasonable cost The Google Mini costs $3,000 which sounds steep to many retailers. Consider, however, the increased benefit of raising your conversion rate a tiny percentage - most retailers agree that the cost of the Mini is minimal considering the benefit. The Mini is a hardware and software solution that powers searches on your site. The rack-mountable server is easy to install and you can probably have it up and running within an hour out of the box. By taking the search load off of your existing server you are also likely to see an increase in productivity from your existing resources.

The Google Mini is scalable The Google Mini can index 100,000 pages on your site without any decrease in performance. When you exceed this limit (meaning you have a site that is very large) you can upgrade to the Google Search Appliance for about $30,000 that will index over a million different pages.