PicoSearch Revises Hosted Search For SMBs

PicoSearch announced Thursday that it has broadened its search-as-a-service, letting SMBs and other organizations incorporate search capabilities into their websites.

New features include autocomplete, query rules, tabled results, and statistical reporting. (Some aspects of new features are only available for Professional and Premium Accounts.)

Searching within a site can help users find and narrow results as an alternative to browsing through site menus and links, or using an external search engine, such as Google or Bing (including the domain to restrict the search). Search using local or hosted service lets you re-index and refresh when site content changes.

New features include autocomplete, query rules, tabled results, and statistical reporting. (Some aspects of new features are only available for Professional and Premium Accounts.) Once a company has signed up, PicoSearch, an SAS company, handles indexing and search queries.

PicoSearch's AutoComplete includes advanced customizability, which, according to the company, "allows companies to automatically offer suggested searches to visitors, from a list of matches."

Query Rules let a company define such things as as alternate spellings as well as standardize punctuation within searches. Tabled Results return results such as products and services as a table, displaying results -- which can include pictures -- as columns.

Companies using PicoSearch include the Oxford English Dictionary, SportsBottleWorld.com, Valley General Hospital, and The Celtic Merchant.

"Websites that offer visitors a navigation tool to quickly narrow down information can drastically improve results," said Fiona McNeill, global product marketing manager at SAS. "The new Query Rules feature offers the possibility to rewrite user queries to your specifications."

"Without PicoSearch, visitors could lose patience, wading through hundreds of search results from global search engines," said Lesley Hayes, IT Support, Barlow Tyrie Ltd., a garden furniture maker.

PicoSearch provides four search engine plans: Free (ad-sponsored), Professional (starting at $80/year), and Premium plans (R498/year) for small to medium size websites, and the Platinum plan for large websites with from 50,000 pages to millions of pages.