Top 10 Site Search Software Tools & Plugins for 2024

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Whether you’re running an ecommerce store or a marketing agency or even a personal blog, you want to make sure that your website visitors have an exceptional experience. That means ensuring they can easily find what they’re looking for–whether it’s products, services, or information. This is why site search software solutions are an important element to enhance the visitor experience and offer seamless navigation.

In this post, we help you narrow down the best site search software to consider in 2024. This will make it easier to choose from the hundreds of options out there so you don’t have to spend hours assessing several solutions. Let’s take a look.


Top Site Search Software Tools:


What Is Site Search Software and Why Do You Need It?

Site search software refers to a tool that lets your site visitors run a search for a specific keyword/phrase within your website. This makes it easy to find content, products, or pages that they need, helping to simplify and shorten the customer journey

Having site search functionality in place is important for a number of reasons. Some of the biggest ones are:

Provide Instant Access to Information

It helps to satisfy the need of visitors to find what they need right now. Having the ability to search through the entire website makes it easy to instantly access the information they need. This cuts the time taken to sort through filters and search through category options to find what they need. And the simplified and streamlined process helps to enhance the overall visitor experience.

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For example, someone searching for white high heels won’t have to navigate to footwear > high heels > color: white. Instead, they can simply enter the term “white high heels” and get a list of relevant products.

Increase Sales and Engagement

People conducting a search on your website know exactly what they want–whether it’s a product, a service, or information on a certain topic. This means they’re more likely to buy your products or engage with your content compared to other visitors. By enabling them to quickly find what they need, you improve the chances of converting them.

It also means visitors are less likely to leave because they’re finding what they need. This significantly decreases your bounce rate and improves your average time on site.

Gain Insight into Your Audience

The data from site search can help you gain more insight into your audience. You can take a look at the phrases being used and the products being searched for to know what your visitors are looking for. This information can then inform different aspects of your business strategy–from content marketing to product development.


Best Site Search Software Solutions in 2024

There are hundreds of site search tools available in the market today, which makes it extremely challenging to find one that works best for you. To make your search (pun intended) easier, here are the top 10 site search software solutions in 2024:

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1. AddSearch

AddSearch

AddSearch offers lightning-fast site search that allows visitors to get instant results. This customizable solution lets you add effortless search functionality to any website or app. It gives you complete control over your search results, with the option to include auto-complete and search suggestions, exclude or add content, and boost the ranking of specific sections or pages. 

It also allows you to choose between traditional form submit and instant search results. You can further customize the design of your search section by adding filters, sorting, and facets. And you can even choose to display ecommerce grid views to optimize the search experience. Additionally, AddSearch lets you personalize the visitor experience with smart product recommendations and personalized search results.

What’s great about this tool is that it comes with robust analytics features that give you insights into visitor search intent. You can get a closer look at popular keyword queries that people are using, keywords that don’t answer search intent, or results with a low click-through rate. 


2. Algolia

Algolia

Algolia is a powerful search API that comes with a full-featured search engine. The lightning-fast search engine is typo-tolerant and language-aware, which helps to improve search relevance. It’s highly customizable so you can create unique search experiences for your customers.  

This site search software solution offers a suite of AI tools that help to enhance the search experience and boost your conversions. It can be used for suggesting synonyms to improve search accuracy. It can also make personalized recommendations and infer items that are frequently bought together for a more seamless search experience. This enables your visitors to find exactly what they need along with other products or content that might be useful to them.


3. Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon CloudSearch

This cloud-based search solution from Amazon Web Services gives you a simple and cost-effective option to set up site search. It boasts of auto-scaling capabilities, which automatically scales up or down your domain’s resources based on changes in your data or query volume. This simplifies the whole process for you, eliminating the need to make manual and time-consuming updates. But you also have the option to control this manually, which allows you to prepare ahead of time if you’re anticipating a surge in search traffic.

Amazon CloudSearch comes with all the popular search features such as auto-complete, intelligent text processing, custom indexing, and geospatial search. It also supports 34 languages, which makes it an excellent solution for businesses that cater to an international audience or intend to expand globally.


4. Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch

This search engine from Elastic lets you implement a powerful and seamless search experience for your visitors. It’s highly customizable, letting you rank your search results based on different factors such as popularity, search frequency, or recency. You can even mix these factors up to fine-tune how visitors see search results on your website.

Elasticsearch is built for human users, which means that it’s equipped to handle mistakes that humans often make such as typos. This helps to improve search relevance and enhance the overall search experience. It offers real-time crawling, which automatically detects changes in content and ensures that search results are fresh and relevant.

It even comes with built-in analytics dashboards so you can get real-time insights into search behavior. These insights will help you to optimize your site search to cater to the unique needs and behavior of your visitors.


5. Swiftype

Swiftype

Swiftype is an easy-to-use site search solution that indexes your site in real-time and automatically sets up search without the need to use code. However, it also offers the flexibility for developers to gain extra control over the functionality using an API. The Swiftype Search Overlay lets you display results across all your pages without disrupting your site markup.

This site search tool helps you enhance the user experience with auto-complete suggestions that will guide visitors to the right products, answers, and content. Additionally, it expands on simple search by enabling visitors to refine their search results using different attributes such as content type, date, author, price, or location. What visitors end up with is a highly relevant list of results that will show them exactly what they’re searching for.


6. Search.io

Search.io

Formerly Sajari, Search.io is an AI-powered search engine that helps you deliver fast and accurate search results to your visitors. Instead of relying on periodic crawls, Search.io offers instant indexing using a built-in crawler to keep your content updated in near real-time. 

It lets you have complete control over your search rankings so you can ensure that certain products or topics are displayed more prominently in the search results to improve their visibility. You can even customize your search results pages to make sure that they match the overall look and feel of your website.

Search.io offers an intuitive search UI that offers instant results and dynamic search suggestions with typo tolerance. That means even with misspelled search queries, your site visitors still get great results that are relevant to what they’re looking for. Intuitive real-time previews make it even easier for visitors to quickly find what they need.


7. Cludo

Cludo

Cludo is a site search solution that’s robust yet easy to implement. It boasts an automated search that quickly understands how visitors respond to search results, which then allows it to automatically optimize performance with each search. This helps to deliver highly relevant search results and get your visitors closer to conversions. With this site search tool, you gain access to plenty of useful features such as intelligent auto-completion, spell checking, and bigram matching. 

Cludo also offers automated search analytics, which provides you with valuable insights on what’s working and what isn’t. So you can learn more about the searches that visitors conduct on your site, what they’re looking for, and what’s important to them. These insights can then inform different aspects of your strategy such as content marketing and improve the overall visitor experience.


8. Apache Solr

Apache Solr

Built on Apache Lucene, this open-source enterprise search platform is scalable and lightning-fast. It has advanced full-text search capabilities enabled with powerful matching features so users can easily find phrases, grouping, joins, and wildcards across multiple data types. It offers all the search essentials that help to deliver a seamless search experience such as auto-complete, spell checking, and more. 

Apache Solr is optimized to handle high-volume traffic and is easy to scale up or down depending on your changing needs. The near real-time indexing capabilities ensure that your content remains fresh and search results are always relevant and updated. For more advanced customization, Apache Solr boasts extensible plug-in architecture so you can easily plug in index and query time plug-ins or change any code you want.


9. Site Search 360

Site Search 360

This custom site search solution is fast, comprehensive, and easy to install. You can get it up and running in just a few minutes. Site Search 360 offers all the essentials to provide a seamless search experience including smart semantic search, search analytics, and auto-complete suggestions for instant results. You can also customize it to perfectly fit your needs and your website design and structure. So you can order your search results and highlight key content to boost the visibility of certain results.

Site Search 360 offers clever content grouping to deliver an excellent user experience, allowing visitors to find relevant and similar results in an instant. Plus, it supports 19 languages, making it a great option for businesses that cater to a global audience. 

This search solution offers an ontology-enhanced product search, which automatically understands the meaning behind your visitors’ queries. So shoppers have an intuitive way to find exactly what they need, allowing them to enjoy a seamless and simple purchasing experience.


10. Inbenta

Inbenta

Inbenta is a powerful AI platform that offers a robust internal search engine to simplify and enhance your search experience. You can easily implement faceted search by indexing content from all relevant sources and connecting it with your product catalog. Inbenta allows you to provide a seamless visitor experience by auto-completing their queries, understanding the meaning behind their queries, and making suggestions based on frequently asked questions.

Powered by a natural language processing engine, Inbenta can understand the intention and see past typos to provide the most relevant answers. So your visitors can still find exactly what they need even when with misspellings and inexact queries. 

The analysis dashboard allows you to keep an eye on search trends to better understand your visitors and their needs. You can use these insights to inform your strategies and optimize user flows for an even more seamless visitor experience.



Building a Seamless Search Experience

When people visit your website, they expect to be able to find the information they need when they need it. Providing them with a robust search tool and a seamless search experience is a great way to enhance their overall experience interacting with your brand. So you can eventually boost engagement, drive conversations, and keep them coming back to your site. Make the most of the tools suggested above to strengthen your website with powerful site search functionality.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is site search software?

Site search software ensures that users can easily find what they’re looking for–whether it’s products, services, or information. Visitors can run a search for specific keywords or keyphrases within your website.

What is the best search tool for finding web sites?

The best search tool for finding websites is Google. Google is highly rated by users and is one of the largest indexers of the web.

What is enterprise search software?

Enterprise search software refers to software that helps users search for information inside a corporate organization. The software will identify and enable indexing, searching and content for authorized users across the enterprise.

What is Swiftype search?

Swiftype is an advanced search algorithm that will deliver relevant results for complicated queries. Our language modeling intelligence enables users to search intuitively and find relevant content.

About the Author
Nadica Naceva, Head of Content at Influencer Marketing Hub, is a seasoned writer and reviewer with in-depth expertise in digital and content marketing. Leveraging her extensive experience in guiding content creation and strategic direction, Nadica brings a critical eye and analytical approach to reviewing articles and educational pieces. Her commitment to accuracy, integrity, and innovation with each review helps IMH grow as a leading source in influencer marketing. Her insights are backed by first-party data, ensuring content meets the highest standards of relevance.