...features, deployment and customization, and a range of pricing options.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Solid choices for hosted search are available from WebSideStory (websidestory.com), a public Web analytics company that purchased Atomz in May 2005; Blossom Software (blossom.com); Fast Search & Transfer (FAST, fastsearch.com); and CrownPeak (crownpeak.com). Each has made progress in visibility during the last 12 months.

WebSideStory will crawl your site and store your information in a remote database. When someone enters a query in the search form on your site, the WebSideStory server application receives the query, formats the results and sends them back in an HTML form with links directly to the pages on your site.

Blossom Software, which offers a similar service and some of the lowest cost solutions on the market for hosted search, is a 5-year-old company founded by a former Bell Labs scientist.

FAST, a major player in the Fortune 500 market, is coming off a record year in customer acquisition and profitability, and putting more emphasis on hosted search for 2006.

Other hosted search options are growing out of content management systems, like CrownPeak, which introduced its proprietary-hosted search solution in 2005.

Webmasters often start with the easiest path, such as presuming Microsoft (microsoft.com) has the best plan, and then moving to hosted solutions for search. Ben Vivante, Webmaster for the town of Brookline, Mass. (town.brookline.ma.us), says, "We used to use the search service that was included in the original version of Microsoft Internet Information Server [IIS]. When we upgraded IIS, the search function was changed. We did a workaround--a hack actually--to use the older ISS's search. The Blossom hosted service allowed us to free up resources for other important jobs."

Steve Kusmer, co-founder of Atomz and now senior VP of search and content solutions at WebSideStory, is one of the pioneers in hosted search. "Hosted search is simply a better way to deliver customer satisfaction," he says.

Hosted search is for Web sites

The term "search" can be applied to many areas of a company's IT infrastructure, but hosted search is essentially a Web site search solution maintained and operated by a third party.

Hosted search is now being added to the menu of technology options in many organizations. Customers are buying. For example, Atomz (founded in 1998, now part of WebSideStory's Active Marketing Suite) and Blossom Software (founded in 2000) boast 360 and 250 customers respectively.

Curt Anderson, owner of Municipal Web Services (muniweb.com),...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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