WELCOME
BACK
ISSUES
By Haiwang Yuan, haiwang.yuan@wku.edu
Libraries with web sites would love to have search engines that index the pages of exclusively their sites for their patrons. They also want the service to be free of charge, with no hardware/software installation and configuration hassles. Atomz.com Search, <http://www.atomz.com> is one such service. Within seconds after an account is established, an email message about the account will arrive to point to a few lines of HTML on Atomz.com’s Web site. Add the HTML to any page(s) of the site just submitted and the job is done. The service is free for sites under five hundred pages. The company’s logo is shown on search results, provided automatically by the service provider. The only maintenance needed is to index the site each time changes are made to any of the pages. Indexing is a matter of a few mouse clicks.
Atomz.com Search offers flexible control over search features. Just key in the full URL to have all the pages under that directory indexed and made searchable. For example, by typing in <http://www.wku.edu/Library> and a few URLs like <http://www.wku.edu/Library/museum/>, WKU Libraries had its entire Web site indexed across two servers simultaneously. The sites do not have to be on the same server, and more than one account may be requested by the user. The look and feel of search results can be adjusted by using ready-to-go online templates.
The search reports rank and graph search words/phrases by day, week or month. Library web developers and administrators can use this invaluable information to improve the design and layout of their web sites. It also reports broken links from specific pages. When a site has more than five hundred pages, the user of the free service is prompted by Atomz.com to upgrade to a paid program called Search Prime. A thousand-page site such as that of the WKU Libraries would cost $300 a year or $100 a quarter. Visit the Atomz.com site, <http://www.atomz.com> to see its pricing plans.
Other free search engine services are Searchbutton.com and FreeFind.com. While the former at <http://www.searchbutton.com> offers free service to sites of up to a thousand pages with limited times of indexing, the latter at <http://www.freefind.com> is absolutely free and capable of producing a site map for one’s site.
Haiwang Yuan is Assistant Professor and Web Site & Virtual Library Coordinator of Western Kentucky University Libraries & Museum, 1 Big Red Way, Bowling Green, KY 42101.
LIRT News,
March 2000. Volume 22, number 3.
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