A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Snapped this up from one of the SharePoint mailing lists. It's a super cheap way to get a Google search on your site:

  1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE
  2. Create a new folder called "external"
  3. Inside the folder create a single HTML page with the following contents:

    <FORM method=GET action="http://www.google.com/search"
    target="_blank">
    <A HREF="
    http://www.google.com/" target="_blank">
    <IMG SRC="
    http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_40wht.gif" border="0"
    align="absmiddle"></A>
    <INPUT TYPE=text name=q size=30 maxlength=255 value="">
    <INPUT type=submit name=btnG VALUE="Google Search" style="font-
    size:10">
    </FORM>
  4. Save the file as "google.htm"
  5. Next drop a Page Viewer Web Part onto your page and point it to the page you created. The url to the page will be http://servername/_layouts/external/google.htm

Simple, easy, fast, and free. No web part installations required. If you want something more sophisticated you can check out Mark Wagner's real Google Web Part (with full source code) here.

Thanks to Chris Dimarco for the information above.

Published Friday, July 15, 2005 3:08 PM by Bil Simser
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Comments

# re: A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Friday, July 15, 2005 5:12 PM by Dave
What am I missing here? Why would you need google to provide a search facility for your own pages. Isn't this type of functionality included with sharepoint?

# re: A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Monday, July 18, 2005 12:59 PM by Heather
Very cool! Thanks!

# re: A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Monday, July 18, 2005 1:56 PM by Eric Negler
Hi all, there are 3 vendors I know of who provide advanced search for Sharepoint.

Coveo offers a fully functional, index limited to 5k documents, free version for those on a budget:

http://www.coveo.com/en/sharepoint-search/download.html

# re: A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Monday, July 18, 2005 11:38 PM by Linda
When I tried this it didn't work until I put the folder in web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

# re: A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Monday, August 08, 2005 9:20 AM by Option: Make it site-specific!
Add this line to make your search site-specific (assuming you've registered your site with Google):

<INPUT TYPE=hidden name=sitesearch value="usingsharepoint.com">

Replace usingsharepoint.com with your domain name.

The advantage of using Google over the built-in search is that Google is more intellegent about indexing entries and allowing wildcards and can do cross-site searches under the specified domain.

WSS doesn't search sub-sites in the domain.

-- Jeff

# re: A Poor Man's Google for SharePoint

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 10:04 PM by Dilip Bajaj
Thanks. Absolutely simple and cool.

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