Search Maker Pro Review

Search Maker Pro 3.2 is a decent search engine creator for websites and offline files.

The installation file was small and installation itself was very easy. When I ran it for the first time, the interface didn't impress me at all; it was functional but not impressive. The navigation was easy though. One can easily navigate the screens using the "Next" Or "Previous" buttons or by using the links provided under the "View" option in the menu bar.

Coming to the actual indexing, Search Maker indexes websites and offline files. In both cases, you get a lot of options to customize your search engine functionality and results. You can select search page and result page templates, choose what type of pages or documents to index, level and domain of pages to index, customize result appearance and much more.

You can select even more options by clicking on the "Advanced Settings" in the "Search Engine" option in the menu bar. In my opinion this is the major strength of the software.

When a software provides so many customization options, you would expect a lot from help files. However this is where Search Maker Pro disappoints in a big way. Not every functionality is documented and even for those for which help is available, there are lot of loose ends that are open to different interpretations. I'm a technical guy but even then I had difficulty understanding what the help document was trying to convey. So I can imagine how hard it would be for a rank newbie to follow the instructions.

There are some other caveats as well. The size of the indexed file for one. I indexed a website that had 5 pages of average size. But even then the size of the indexed file was 64 KB, so with websites having hundreds or thousands of pages the size of the indexed file would be gigantic. And the fact that Search Maker Pro doesn't run on Vista renders it useless for computers and servers having the latest OS from Microsoft.