Site Search 360 FAQ

Site Search 360 is a simple way to add a search field (on-site search) to your website or app. Our engine lets your visitors search your content quickly and accurately.

As soon as you sign up for a free trial, our crawlers go to the domain you provided and index every page of your website. After the indexing is complete, you can try out searching your content right from the search bar in your Control Panel, so that you can see if further fine-tuning is necessary:

After you place our JavaScript widget on your site, your search goes live. Your visitors can now enjoy getting instant search suggestions and results.

This step-by-step guide walks you through the entire setup process.

Integrating Site Search 360 is easy and requires little technical know-how. The search will work with any CMS like Joomla, Magento, HubSpot, Drupal, etc.

All you have to do is insert the Site Search 360 JavaScript code snippet that we provide, into your site's HTML template. You should place it in the header of your HTML template and make sure it is integrated within all your pages.

The installation is even easier with Site Search 360 plugins for WordPress, Cloudflare, Drupal, and Lightspeed.

We do have an HTTP REST API for developers who wish to implement our search via API.

Unsure about this? No worries, we're happy to help: feel free to contact us anytime.

There are three methods to get your content into Site Search 360.

Crawling: Site Search 360 crawlers simply go to the root URL(s) you provided under Crawler Settings and index all your pages and documents. For cross-site search simply list all the domains you want us to crawl. The search results will be then merged into one index.

Sitemap: you can submit your robots.txt sitemap or create a specific one for Site Search 360. Only URLs found in the sitemap will be crawled and indexed with this setting.  In general, this is a cleaner and a faster indexing method.

API: Holmes and Batman plan users can add pages from any website(s) via our API using the assigned API key. You can either index by URL or send a JSON object with the indexable content.

Our Search Designer tool makes this job a piece of cake: change text and theme colors, background, size, captions, layout, and more in just a few clicks. Once you're satisfied with the result, all you have to do is to copy and paste the generated code.

If you want to bring your own stylesheet, here's how to override our CSS.

Can I hire you to help me with the search implementation?

What Content Management Systems does Site Search 360 integrate with?

Yes, autocomplete is a built-in feature and it is included in all plans. By default search suggestions appear once you type 3 letters in the search box. The suggestions become more precise as you continue typing.

When you cluster your content into Result Groups, those categories are automatically displayed in the search suggestions. They appear as separate blocks with their own suggestions to the query. Here're a couple examples:

Yes, you can definitely use Site Search 360 on multi-language websites. 19 languages* are currently supported: English, Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish.

You will need to create an account per language to keep the index and the search results separate from one another. We recommend signing up only once with your "main" language and adding all your other languages to your Managed Accounts. This allows you to easily navigate between the different language versions of your site. You can also rename your accounts accordingly, for example Spanish website instead of website.es.

If your sub-accounts are different language versions of the same site, we offer them at a discounted rate. You won't need to pay for every language separately. Please contact us for a custom offer.

* Didn't find your language in the list? Let us know as we're constantly adding new ones and you can help us prioritize! We will also gladly offer assistance should you decide to streamline the process by providing us with the necessary translations!

If your site's language isn’t officially supported, you can still use Site Search 360 to its full capabilities. You’ll just need to make some manual adjustments to the search, like translate search interface elements (“Show All Results”/“Show More” buttons, “Sort By” dropdown menu, etc.) and add custom synonyms to the project (in order to correct misspellings or let our system know which keywords have the same meaning).

Yes, we do support cross-domain search and it doesn't matter whether the sites are subdomains of the same main domain or if you are merging completely different domains into one index - Site Search 360 can handle both. Even better: this feature is included in all plans, even the free one.

After configuration, you will end up with a single search field so that your customers can search through the content of multiple websites and subdomains at once.

Yes, there are a few options. You can:
- whitelist our crawler's IP addresses for it to access all pages without login:

• 88.99.218.202
• 88.99.149.30
• 88.99.162.232
• 149.56.240.229
• 51.79.176.191
• 51.222.153.207
• 139.99.121.235
• 94.130.54.189
• 116.202.85.24
• 88.99.29.101

- provide a special sitemap.xml with deep links to the hidden content
- push your content to our HTTP REST API

In case of HTTP Basic Auth, you can submit username/password to the Crawler settings (click on Advanced Settings). We also support cookie-based authentication.

My organization has strict accessibility requirements. Is Site Search 360 WCAG 2.0 AA compliant?

Yes, we pay special attention to accessibility and we have invested a lot of time and energy to become WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 compliant. You can test our compliancy in any Web testing tool.

Besides scoring 100/100 on Google's Lighthouse accessibility test, we're honored to be chosen as a custom site search engine by Accessibility Developer Guide.

Along with HTML files Site Search 360 can index PDF, Word Documents, PowerPoint, Excel, and Open Text Formats when they are linked from your website or listed in your sitemap.

Note: this feature is included in all paid plans as well as in the free trial. If you decide to stick to the Free plan once your trial is over, PDF and other document indexing will be deactivated.

Yes. Here's an overview of Site Search 360 tools allowing you to add filters and facets to your search results:

1. Result groups are a quick way to group your content into several big categories such as Products, Blog, News, etc.
2. Data points are reoccurring bits of information used on your site such as publication date, author, price tags, dates, etc. Extracting this information enriches your search snippets; they can be used globally as well as within a specific content group.
3. Filters are essential for e-commerce websites as they help quickly funnel down through large result sets with range (such as Price) and multi-select filters (such as Product type, brand, color, size, etc.).
4. You may place a hidden HTML table in the HTML source code of your pages to add custom filters.
5. When using our API, you'll first need to set up filters in our control panel and then define them by the auto-generated Filter-ID with the rest of your content uploaded to the API.

Yes, we support integration of Site Search 360 into your Google Analytics and/or the data layer of Google Tag Manager.

Yes, Site Search 360 has a HTTP REST API which can be used to push pages into the index. The API is easy to use and works with all HTTP enabled programming languages. You can look over the API documentation, view the Postman Collection, or browse examples to see more code to use in your project.

All new accounts start with a two-week trial of Batman plan, so you have access to all our features. There is a 5,000 page limit for trial accounts that can be lifted upon your request.

If you do not subscribe to any of the paid plans before your trial expires, your account will be automatically downgraded to the Free plan on the 15th day since the opening of the account. We do not ask for any credit card information during signup, therefore there's no way we can charge you until you decide to go for a paid plan.

When you subscribe to a paid plan, you pay upfront for the first month or the first year of service depending on your subscription choice.

Note: if you switch plans during trial – even to the free plan – your trial is ended immediately. Purchasing a plan ends your trial, too.

We never litter your website with third-party ads but we do subtly display our own logo for smaller plans.

• The Free plan includes the Site Search 360 logo that is shown both under search suggestions and above search results.
• The Columbo plan has less Site Search 360 branding: the logo is only shown above search results.

Example of branding in search suggestions (Free plan only):

Example of our logo in search results (Free and Columbo plans):

To remove Site Search 360 logo you need to upgrade your plan to Holmes or higher. See the full plan comparison table here: www.sitesearch360.com/pricing

No, once you've subscribed to a monthly plan, your payments will be automatic and you will be charged the same day every month for the upcoming period. You can specify any email address(es) in the Invoice recipient field to keep track of all your payments.

You can pay by card monthly or annually. All our automatic payments are processed by Stripe. Stripe accepts all major debit and credit cards worldwide but you can double check whether it's the case for you.

When paying annually, you get an automatic 10% discount.

Direct invoicing and payment via bank transfer, check or PayPal is possible but reserved for annual Batman licenses. You can compare plan features at our pricing page.

Yes, we do offer custom pricing. Once you've signed up for a trial account, you can go to the Plan section and build your own Custom plan. The price is automatically adjusted based on your requirements: how many pages you need indexed, how many monthly queries are expected, how often you'd like your website(s) to be automatically re-crawled, whether there is any YouTube or JavaScript content to index, and other options.

All Site Search 360 plans are paid in US Dollars ($). Conversion to your local currency is done using the daily exchange rate from our payment provider.

No, not yet. We're currently looking at a few affiliate programs, if you think you're a good fit, let us know! If you've integrated Site Search 360 for five or more different clients, get in touch and we'll work out a custom offer for you.

Site Search 360 has the right to change the program policy at any time. 

We fully comply with GDPR requirements for protecting your personal data. Site Search 360 does not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise transfer any personally identifiable data with other people/parties without your consent. As a data controller who processes your visitors data on your behalf, we have introduced and pre-signed a Data Processing Addendum (DPA). 

All sensitive information you submit is encrypted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and the communication between your site and the Site Search 360 servers is secured via HTTPS request.

Please refer to our privacy policy for further details.

Our servers are hosted in Germany, Canada, and Singapore but we use Cloudflare's Content Delivery Network (CDN) for a faster access: with global distribution your users are always redirected to the closest server.

The service response time is usually between 10 and 100ms (~20ms on average) per request but final times depend on multiple factors out of our control such as the search query and its parameters, user location, and the internet connection speed of the user.

We guarantee that the Site Search 360 API, search, and control panel will have an uptime of at least 99.9% on a monthly average.
Our uptime is monitored by multiple services and multiple servers guarantee redundancy and reduced risk of outages. Our status page provides real-time monitoring so you can check the service availability anytime.

Paid plans are charged monthly or yearly. If you are not satisfied with the service, you can cancel anytime. You will be refunded for paid services if our service was not working.

If you have any questions about our Refund Policy, please send us an email or log into your control panel to use the private contact message option.