Creating a search engine is very similar to creating a sitemap. First, select 'Create a new sitemap using Layout Wizard' from the welcome dialog or choose Layout Wizard from program toolbar. In the first step of Layout Wizard (Mode selection) make sure you select 'I want to create a search engine'. This is not required but will greatly reduce time necessary to index a website. You can choose any mode of Layout Wizard. Please go to Selection Wizard section of program help to find out which mode will work best for you.

You can add additional documents to be indexed in the layout view. Now, go to Options / Search (note: you may need to change current style to Search engine in options/style to make the Search options dialog visible).

First of all, you need to set the operating system and of the server hosting your website. Setting an invalid operating system will generate a CGI script incompatible with the web server. Version 6.1. of SiteXpert introduced an ActiveX search engine which will run without an HTTP server. This search type should be used when creating a search engine for CD-ROMs or local searches.

If you have relative links in the layout (e.g. if you used Layout Wizard on local or network disk or if you selected 'use relative links' in navigation mode of Layout Wizard) you need to set 'default website for relative links' to the root location of indexed files. SiteXpert will add this prefix to all links, ensuring validity of links from the search results page.

If you want to customize messages displayed by the search engine, click on 'Customize message texts...'. This will allow you to translate the whole search engine to a different language. Another thing you may want to do when creating a search engine for a language with special characters is clicking on the 'Character translation' button. This will take you to the 'Character translation table' dialog where you will be able to define special characters in your language and their substitutes. Please click here to find out more.

Please go to Search Options section of program help to find out about other options.

To create search engine files (databases, CGI script and the main HTML search page) choose Generate from program toolbar. If you forgot to set output options you will need to do so before SiteXpert can create the files. You can save all your settings (including indexed database) for future use by choosing the 'save' command from the toolbar.

Professional edition of SiteXpert allows automatic generation of search engine (and sitemaps). For example you can have SiteXpert run daily, which would automatically index the website and upload updated files. You can find out more in program help.

The above steps are all you need to create a search engine for your website. However, if you want to customize the looks of your website you can go to Options and choose fonts, colors, etc. Alternatively you can choose one of predefined search engine schemes (like Yahoo, Altavista, HotBot, Google). Another important thing you may want to do is go to Options / Content and define <META> tags (e.g. character set) and the remaining contents of the HTML search pages.