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All I can find online is stuff about search result rankings, which I'm not concerned with at the moment. We're going to have a cloud-based online database and we want Google search results for something relevant to our site to display our website's search results for the same query.

For example, if someone types in "lunchbox" to google, there might be a result that says "Amazon search results for 'lunchbox'" and then you click that and it takes you to amazon, and it's already searched 'lunchbox' for you.

What can we do to enable this capability for our site?

gnat
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Newbie
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    You will want to research "SEO", which stands for "Search Engine Optimization". It's a big question, too big to give a simple answer here. – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner Jul 26 '12 at 15:20
  • Thank you. Can you advise me on what subcategories within SEO to look at? Or any good online references I can read? SEO is a pretty broad topic, and other than this problem our search engine is working great, so I'm guessing most of it will be redundant except whatever small part talks about this specific problem. – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 15:27
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    I'm not sure how Amazon does that neat trick. They might have predefined search results for common queries that they get Google's bots to crawl. Or maybe Amazon has an explicit agreement with Google. Or maybe Google exposes an API for this. I really don't know. And yes, SEO is a huge topic. And remember that with SEO, results can never be guaranteed. ;) – FrustratedWithFormsDesigner Jul 26 '12 at 15:40
  • I know there's gotta be a way to do it... Plenty of sites have this capability. – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 15:47
  • You're trying to get your website to pop up for ANY Google Search and offer a summary of the things that your site has found as an alternative? The only way you're going to get past Google with that one is with $ or by offering a Browser Plugin which augments Google searches. – 8bitjunkie Jul 26 '12 at 16:21
  • No, not ANY Google search... just any that are relevant to the content on our site. I don't care how highly it's ranked at the moment, I just want the ABILITY for our search results to be indexed by Google, but without making a huge page of possible relevant queries. – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 16:31

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You can restrict Google's search results to a specific site with the site: directive.

lunchbox +site:amazon.com

will tell Google to only query "lunchbox" on domains at/under "amazon.com" (that last bit is important: "+site:stackexchange.com" gets you hits on the entire network).

I re-read your question, and am not sure that my first interpretation was correct. It now seems like you're actually saying "when someone comes from Google, I want to re-run my own search with the same search terms."

If that's the case then the answer's easy: look at the Referer header, and pull the terms out of it.

parsifal
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  • Thanks, but that is how an end user searches for something on a site without actually going to that site first. My question is more about how to enable the site's results to come up on Google without the user using the site: directive. They just type in what they're looking for, "lunchbox" as an example, and one of the results they get automatically is Amazon's search results for "lunchbox." Many sites do the same type of thing, like Yelp. – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 16:24
  • @your second answer: kind of... I just want my search results to be indexed along with the homepage of my site. But I don't want to sit and make a huge list of popular search terms. And all my site really is, is just a search engine that searches a bunch of images hosted in the cloud. So I don't have pages with a bunch of links on them. – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 17:22
  • I think I answered my own question... Apparently GoogleBot actually crawls through HTML GET forms already! http://www.ampercent.com/search-bots-crawl-html-forms/6717/ Agree? Disagree? – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 18:47
  • Well now that I think about your 2nd answer more... it seems like that might actually be what I want to do... but how would I link to that internal search from Google? – Newbie Jul 26 '12 at 19:39