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About search forms

You can create a search form to let site visitors search your web site for specific words or phrases.

When site visitors enter text in the search form and click the search button, they will get a list of your web pages with content that matches their search criteria. Microsoft FrontPage carries out the search and returns the names and locations of your web pages that contain that text.

The easiest way to create a search form is to create a new page based on the Microsoft FrontPage Search Page template. You can customize the template with your own introductory text, copyright information, button labels, and so on.

How search forms work

If your web site is hosted on a web server running the FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft, FrontPage automatically creates a text index based on the words contained in all of the pages in your web site. When a visitor submits a search form, FrontPage checks the text index and displays a weighted list of hyperlinks to the pages containing the search text.

Search form design

Changing the size of the text box doesn't affect how many characters a site visitor can type in the box. If a site visitor types more characters than will fit in the box, the extra characters will scroll off the left side of the box, but all the text the site visitor types will be submitted with the search form.

Type some text in the search form text box below to see how it works:

Indexing Service versus WAIS

If your web site is published to a web server running Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the search form uses Indexing Service to search the text index. Indexing Service has more extensive support for searching non-English systems and Microsoft Office documents.

If you server is not running IIS, FrontPage uses the WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) search engine that is included with FrontPage to search the text index.

Note   Your web server administrator or ISP can tell you if the server is using IIS.

When new pages are added to your web site

When you save a page in a web site, FrontPage adds any new words to the text index for that web site. The text index is cumulative: new words are added to the index, but old ones are not removed. You can also create a new text index and purge outdated words.

Note    A search form will not locate approximately 300 of the most common English words, such as "a," "the," and so on.