I find the search box very useful with "search site" option included. It saves lot of time especially when browsing bigger sites.

On the otherhand you are likely to get some bucks out of it too.

Originally Posted by TeamPlayer

Does it perhaps make it too easy for potental customers to look elsewhere, so in a way adding a search box could be counter-productive.

Thoughts anyone?

I do not use it on my serious sites for this reason. I want to keep customers on my site and get them to buy from me, not offer or distract them with alternatives Google search box offer people searching.

I will not put it on my prime sites.

I have used a Google search box in the past and was able to make some revenue from it, so it's not a bad idea at all.

Also, a google search box on a site does not make it look messy compared to lots of google ads and visitors do you use google search boxes.

At the moment, I have a couple of mini-sites which are really parking pages in disguise!

I use a service from 1Plus.net (Soon to be iModo.com) which displays content for the domain. You can put Adsense ads on this page as well as a Google Search Bar. The search bars pay out more for me than the normal ads, but they are not used as frequently, mainly because most of the traffic hitting these mini-sites comes from Search Engines themselves.

I would tend not to use them for anything else though.

Doesn't the "Search Site" function only search the indexed pages in google. Therefore new sites, and new content won't be found?

Well, yes, Google will only bring up what it has got indexed.

Originally Posted by soEvo

Doesn't the "Search Site" function only search the indexed pages in google. Therefore new sites, and new content won't be found?

You have to ensure that you submit a google sitemap regularly so that google knows about your new pages.

I have a google search box on my site, well it is on some pages, but more recently I made a search page that contains the google search box and I link to this from every other page on my site as the google search box is quite large in size (kb). Some of the older pages still have the search box though!

It is quite good and does generate some income

A while back Yahoo were offering a search box through Tradedoubler that paid per search. Unfortunately they've pulled it now.

Yahoo cannot seem to get their advertising strategy together.. their answer to AdSense is still not available in UK