Use a Google Search form

You now have the option of using the Google search engine in a custom form to search your departmental pages. The other documents in this group of pages relate to the old UIC Search engine, based on a locally run Netscape Search server. That is still an option, and still provides some extra flexibility, but using Google is simpler and usually produces better results.

Advantages of Google:

• Simple
• Good results -- excellent relevancy algorithm

• More advanced search options (but often not needed).
• More control over output format
• Pages are indexed several times/week, instead of perhaps once/month, so changes show up sooner.

There are not a lot of options here. Make a normal html form, with the proper action pointing to google, and one hidden element to designate your departmental web pages. Here is an example to search the ACCC web pages:

<form action="http://www.google.com/u/uiatc" method=get>
Query: <input type=text name="q">
<input type=hidden name=hq value="inurl:www.uic.edu/depts/accc">
<input type=submit value="Google Search">
</form>

That's pretty much it. Set the input widget named "q" for the user's query. (Or, I suppose, you could hard-code that if you just wanted a simple link to produce a hard-coded search.) And set the widget named "hq" to point to your departmental page directory. Of course, use the <form> tag above verbatim.