As your website grows in size over time, you may want to think about adding a site-specific search box or widget, to help your readers to find the information they’re seeking among your web pages.

According to stats released by Lijit last November, Google still holds the lead for popular site search widgets, withLijit coming up fast in second place. Other popular search tools named in the Lijit study included Blogbar.org, Eurekster, IceRocket, Quintura, and Sphere.

In the few months since that study was published, Blogbar.org seems to have disappeared from the running — the domain is currently parked, with the registrar’s ad/search holding page in place of the Blogbar site. But let’s take a look at the other 6 site search tools named in the Lijit report, in alphabetical order:

Eurekster

 Eurekster’s Swicki isn’t a conventional site search widget, as such, but way to create a custom search portal that is shaped by those who use it.

Pick whatever topic you want to focus on, customize the appearance of the widget to suit your site design, decide what you want to index — your website or blog, other sites, the web in general, or RSS feeds.  Your swicki will serves up on-topic content to your readers through a widget that combines a tag cloud (or video collage!) and search bar. Post it on your site and share it with your online community — users can contribute links, comment, and vote on the content they find most interesting and useful. The more your swicki is used, the more relevant the search results will become.

Eurekster will display ads on results pages, but non-profit, university, and government organizations may opt out of the advertisements. Take a tour to find out more about how swickis work, or see Eurekster’s swicki directory for examples.

I started to make a swicki to show here as a demonstration, by the way, but received an error message part of the way through the process. I suspect this was a temporary error, related more to today’s unstable internet connection than to any fault at Eurekster, and will be trying again in a day or two, to see if the problem clears up by itself. The widget is interesting enough to be worth a follow-up.

Google

 Google Custom Site Search lets you “harness the power of Google” for your blog or website quickly and easily, and your readers will need no introduction to using the familiar Google search bar on your site.

Create a custom search engine and choose whether you want to include only pages from your own site, or enable users to search the whole Web from your page. A third option is somewhere in the middle — search the Internet, but with results that favor the websites that you select or exclude others. You can also allow others to collaborate on creating a custom search engine, deciding which pages and sites should be indexed.

Results can be hosted on your own site, and there’s a fair amount of customization possible — yet the search engine is easy to set up and install on your site. Reports for the most popular queries and usage statistics are available on the statistics page of your CSE management area of your Google account. Standard Google CSE is ad-supported (the ads are on the results pages, just like a regular Google search) but Google will waive the advertising for non-profit, government, or educational organizations.

Check out Google’s featured examples for some interesting ideas of how your organization might use a custom search engine.

IceRocket

 IceRocket is quick and easy to implement, and may be best suited to blogs — IceRocket is primarily a blog directory service that helps to draw traffic by indexing and distributing RSS feeds. IceRocket offers both “web search” (2 styles of search box) and “web search with site search” boxes for your website. Copy-and-paste the appropriate code to install your choice of six styles, and replace “YOURDOMAIN.COM” with your own domain wherever it appears in the code.

Lijit

 Lijit is powered by Google Custom Site Search, so the results pages have a  familiar look and feel — the difference is in Lijit’s extended “social” features.

Lijit enables your readers to search not only the contents of your own blog or website, but also pages you’ve bookmarked, photos you’ve shared, the sites you’ve included in your blog roll, and so on — your website and also your connections. When you first sign up for an account, Lijit will ask for the most common username that you use online, then it looks for matching public profiles -- you decide which of your social profiles to include. Weekly analytics reports are available to you by email.

As of about 2 weeks ago, Lijit also began to integrate blog comments into its search results. If you’re using JS-Kit, Intense Debate, or Disqus to handle comments on your blog, Lijit search results will show how many comments a post received, with a clickable link to get a preview of the first couple of comments; and “view more comments” will show all the comments on a post.

Quintura

 Quintura describes itself as “a hosted site search, analytics and monetization solution for online content publishers,” with a new affiliate program for web publishers that permits a site-specific search. Quintura’s widget provides a “visual-based search and navigation” in the form of a vertical tag cloud. Clicking on a tag will provide links to search results, in the conventional way, but also another level of tags will appear to help refine the search.  The front page link that invites you to take a tour is broken: see Quintura for Kids to see how the visual search engine works in practice.

Sphere

 Sphere is a bit of a stretch for inclusion on a list of site-search tools. While it does pull “contextually relevant content” from your archives, Sphere is more about syndication than search. The ad-supported  related content widget will present your readers with content drawn from blogs and news sources across the Web — videos and photographs included — as well as content from your own site. No user-operated search form is included (it’s all automatic), and there seems to be no obvious way of controlling or pre-approving what headlines and advertisements will be displayed. On balance, Sphere may be more appropriate for personal or commercial use than for a non-profit organization’s website.