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Free site search for your website
The Culture Portal can provide your site with a free site search that will allow your visitors to search the contents of your site. Please note that this search is only available to the Australian websites listed in our database.
If you are not eligible for a free site search but would like to your site visitors to be able to search for Australian culture from your website install a Bluey cultural search
engine that can be installed in any website.
Contents
| How does it work? | Instructions | Contacting us for help | Further search options | Examples |
How does it work?
The Culture Portal robot examines all pages of your website and creates an index of these results. Your visitor can search your website, other related websites or the entire index of the Culture Portal. It is a powerful tool with many custom options available to create the look and feel you want with a seamless integration into your own website.
This free site search is free from advertisements - all we ask that you acknowledge the Culture Portal as demonstrated below. We generally index the websites listed in our database on a monthly basis.
Search form example:
Note: this is a live example. If you try it, use the back button on your browser to return to this screen.
*Before you begin*
For ease in setting up the Search on your website, you may wish to print out this screen.
To utilise this Search function on your website, your site must first be indexed by the Culture Portal. To see if your website is already indexed, do a search for your website from the search box on the right of every screen.
How to set up your website site search page step by step:
*Tip* If you are using website framesets, please visit our search troubleshooting page after you have constructed your initial search page for tips on fine tuning.
1) Create a new screen in your website with a suitable name, for example, www.yourname.com.au/search/. If you use framesets, create a new frameset (so users can bookmark your search and others can link directly to it).
2) Go to the search code screen select and copy all the search code.
3) Paste the search code into your website.
*Tip* If you are using a WYSIWYG HTML editor, you need to paste the code into the HTML view and not the WYSIWYG view.
4) Find out your website ID number on the Culture Portal
You may already know this, but if you don't there are two ways to find it.
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You can find the number by following these steps:
- Go to the front screen at http://culture.gov.au/.
- Do a search for your website.
- In the results list for your website, click on the "More info" link next to the link to your website. This will take you to the information page we have about your website.
- Look at the URL address for this screen in the address bar at the top of your browser screen.
- Find the text which says "/wsd/", and the number after that, up to the .htm, is the ID number for your website.
For example:
http://culture.gov.au/wsd/403.htm
In this example, the Queensland Community Arts Network website's ID number is 403.
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Alternatively, send an email with the name of your website to editor@culture.gov.au and we'll tell you what it is. Note that it may take us until the next business day to reply to your email.
Within Australia you may also ring us on our FREECALL number 1800 065 754 (during normal business hours Australian eastern time).
5) Put your website's ID number in the search form's code.
Add your website's ID number at VALUE=
eg <INPUT TYPE=radio NAME=WebsiteIDZone VALUE=403 CHECKED>For example, for the ABC, VALUE would be changed to 3
eg <INPUT TYPE=radio NAME=WebsiteIDZone VALUE=3 CHECKED>
6) Change the sample website's name in the search form code to your website's name.
7) Customise your site search results screen to integrate seamlessly with your website's look and feel by changing the value of the hidden header and footer fields. You can get instructions to customise the look and feel of your results screen here.
8) Test. At this point you can test the search to see how it works.
9) Common problems you might encounter are explained in our Troubleshooting screen.
10) Please let us know when you have set up a site search on your website so we can include it in our list of examples. Email your site search web address to editor@culture.gov.au.
Contacting us for help
If you have followed the instructions and you are still having problems, either with making the search work or customising your results screen, please contact us via email to editor@culture.gov.au to get more help.
In your email please include your name, organisation name, website ID number, your daytime telephone number, and the nature of the problem. Please also include the website address of your site search (whether it is linked into your site or still in development) so we can look at the source HTML code if we need to.
Within Australia feel free to ring us on our FREECALL number 1800 065 754 (during normal business hours Australian eastern time).
Further search options
The above example shows how to set up a combined search of your site along with a search of all sites indexed by the Culture Portal, however many other search options are available. You can have multiple searches which target only specific areas of your site, as well as, or instead of, a full site search.
Alternatively, you can not have a site search of your site at all and just have a search of all Australian cultural websites indexed by the Culture Portal. You can have a search of related websites in the same category, for example, all sites indexed under 'Museums' or 'Performing arts', or 'films and video', and so on. This is a handy tool that gives your website added functionality and a new service to your online visitors, as well as further strengthening the links amongst the Australian cultural community.
If you are interested in any of these further search options we can help you tailor a search which meets your specific needs. Please contact us via email to editor@culture.gov.au listing your website address and contact details including a daytime telephone number.
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