Search Maker Pro Review

Search Maker Pro is a program that really leaves you with a sense of frustration. Although it has some very interesting functions, it also contains a number of errors which stop the user from entirely enjoying this innovative piece of software. The downloading and installation process is a breeze – the evaluation version of Search Maker Pro is a mere 3 megabytes, and a neat installation wizard will guide you through the rest. The problems start when actually using Search Maker Pro.

- The interface is extremely simple, and the program seems determined to guide you through every step. This makes it very easy to use for beginners, and yet gives the more advanced programmer a range of options to choose from. However, many of the instructions contain some technical jargon that can confuse someone new to programming. What is a relative URL? What’s the difference between “index.html” and “index.htm”? At times, Search Maker Pro does not seem to be quite sure about who it was intended for. There is not much help available, and the interface is not very graphical to say the least. Inputting the URL of a website, for example, is a much longer process than it could be - instead of using a drag and drop system, the program makes you manually find, copy and paste the URL into a very basic textbox. When encountering these difficulties, the average user will just madly click on the “Next” button and miss out on the more advanced options of Search Maker Pro.

- These advanced functions are however the most interesting part of the program. A very simple editor will allow you to control a number of parameters of your search engine, from Boolean operators to quotes and wildcards. The part of the creation process that is less brushed up is the look of the final search engine. In theory, you can use html templates to customize it, but there is virtually no guidance on which kind of file to use, and there lacks a gallery of ready-made styles the beginner could choose from. As a result, my final search page looked extremely plain – a simple textbox surrounded by three lines of text on a white background.

- Outside the technical jargon and the few other errors, the wizard is rather neat and allows you to make a good search engine in less time than you would have thought possible. After letting you customize every aspect of it, Search Maker Pro indexes all the pages on the website. During my test, the program did not miss out on a single page of the website, and the whole indexation process was very quick. It took about 1mn to recognize all the pages and then about 10 seconds to index each one – not a very long task, especially compared to other search engine builders.

- Once the indexation is finished, the program lets you preview or save the result, a very simple HTML page. Although the basics are covered, the beginner might once again have trouble with this step. There is no option to export the HTML to an existing webpage at all, so you have to manually copy and paste. Finally, there is no help with uploading the page to the internet. In theory, Search Maker Pro also allows you to build search engines for files on your computer, but you can only index one file at a time and RAR or ZIP archives are not supported. Pretty useless, when you come to think of it.

- Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Search Maker Pro to anyone but it could be useful to some. The beginner with no experience with programming will be too confused by the program to make full use of it – if that is your case, I would recommend Google’s personalized search engine service, a dead-simple online solution that costs no money but doesn’t allow you to personalize much either. If you want a program that allows you to choose every single detail of your search engine, you might want to check out Search Engine Studio, which will give you many more options for a much higher price too (100 dollars).
If however you find yourself in the middle ground, Search Maker Pro might be what you’re looking for. It has all the basic functions you need in a search engine builder and is a quick and easy solution to use. If you also happen to have a bit of experience with programming, it can really come in useful as long as you’re ready to pay the nifty price tag of 50$.