Selecting a Search Engine for on-site Search — Open Source vs Search as a Service
On-site search (also known as site search or internal search) allows users to identify the required data from a website by typing queries into a search bar.
The website search helps the visitors to quickly navigate and identify the required content within the website, the website search reduces bounce rate, boosts conversions also helps us to identify what visitors are more interested/looking for in our website. The website search is now an essential part of website design, when your website search doesn’t function as expected it will impact the website visitors(potentially lose the customers).
The important factor is to identify the best search engine/platform that helps you to enable the required website search functionalities. The search platform should be identified not only considering the current business requirements but the future needs — in some cases machine learning capabilities might not be a requirement today but it will become the mandatory requirement in the future.
There are two major categories of search engines:
- Build an internal search engine from scratch
- Open Source
- Search as a Service
