add search bar to web site

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Does inmotion have software to add a search capability to my web site? I could add Google search or other commercial options, but I want to know what my other options are. Also, I found on thesitewizard.com a link to Perl or PHP options to create my own. Do you have any recommendations? (I tried to look for an answer to this in your support articles, but it wasn't differentiating from SEO type questions.) I'm working with Dreamweaver CS 5.5 and am a beginner (I've built one site). Thank you
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JacobIMH

Hello cannonriver, and thanks for the great question.

There are many ways in which you can add a search bar to your website. The ones that you'd make yourself with a server-side scripting language like PHP or Perl will typically require you to setup a database to store all of your content in, and can be a bit complicated if you haven't dealt with server-side coding before.

The easiest way to implement site wide search would simply be to install WordPress, as the newer versions comes with search by default like this example below:

If you wanted a custom search for your existing hand coded site, the best option would be the Google Custom Search Engine which is free and easy to setup on your website. You basically just tell Google what domain name you want to search against, and then click the blue Get code button. Then you just paste the code they give you into a <div> tag within the <body> section of your site. That would look like this:

If you had any other questions at all, please let us know!

- Jacob