Site Search 360 FAQ

Here you can find answers to the most pressing questions about setup, functionality, payment options, trial terms, and more.

CONTACT US

We are tech support wizards and there are multiple ways to contact us:

  • Email: mail[at]sitesearch360.com Our contact form in the footer as well as in your control panel sends your message to the same email address. The turnaround on email is usually less than 4 hours but max. 24 hours.
  • Website chat (in the bottom right corner of this page): During business hours we try to answer your questions immediately. You can always leave your contact email address in the chat and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
  • If you have a technical issue that isn't covered in our Knowledge base, you can browse previous answers or post your question in our Developer community chat:  Average response time during business hours is usually within one to four hours. You will receive a response even if you write in there after business hours.
  • Phone: For Batman plan customers we offer phone support during our business hours: +49 351 32 123 102

Our business hours are 9am-6pm (GMT+1).

GETTING STARTED

What is Site Search 360 and how does it work?

Site Search 360 is a simple way to add a search field (on-site search) to your website or app. Our engine lets your visitors search your content quickly and accurately.

As soon as you sign up for a free trial, our crawlers go to the domain you provided and index every page of your website. After the indexing is complete, you can try out searching your content right from the search bar in your Control Panel, so that you can see if further fine-tuning is necessary:

SS360 Dashboard screenshot

After you place our JavaScript widget on your site, your search goes live. Your visitors can now enjoy getting instant search suggestions and results.

This step-by-step guide walks you through the entire setup process.

How do I add Site Search 360 to my website? Do I need programming skills?

Integrating Site Search 360 is easy and requires little technical know-how. The search will work with any CMS like Joomla, Magento, HubSpot, Drupal, etc.

All you have to do is insert the Site Search 360 JavaScript code snippet that we provide, into your site's HTML template. You should place it in the header of your HTML template and make sure it is integrated within all your pages.

The installation is even easier with Site Search 360 plugins for WordPress, Cloudflare, Drupal, and Lightspeed.

We do have an HTTP REST API for developers who wish to implement our search via API.

Unsure about this? No worries, we're happy to help: feel free to contact us anytime.

How does Site Search 360 get my content?

There are three methods to get your content into Site Search 360.

Crawling: Site Search 360 crawlers simply go to the root URL(s) you provided under Crawler Settings and index all your pages and documents. For cross-site search simply list all the domains you want us to crawl. The search results will be then merged into one index.

Sitemap: you can submit your robots.txt sitemap or create a specific one for Site Search 360. Only URLs found in the sitemap will be crawled and indexed with this setting.  In general, this is a cleaner and a faster indexing method.

API: Holmes and Batman plan users can add pages from any website(s) via our API using the assigned API key. You can either index by URL or send a JSON object with the indexable content.

How do I customize search box and search results?

Our Search Designer tool makes this job a piece of cake: change text and theme colors, background, size, captions, layout, and more in just a few clicks. Once you're satisfied with the result, all you have to do is to copy and paste the generated code.

If you want to bring your own stylesheet, here's how to override our CSS.

 

Can I hire you to help me with the search implementation?

While we do help paid customers make sure that Site Search 360 works correctly and blends nicely into their sites by adjusting the layout and styling, if more extensive customization is needed or if you need a feature that’s not offered out of the box, we can evaluate the scope of the project and work out a custom quote based on a per-hour rate. Please reach out to discuss the details.

What Content Management Systems does Site Search 360 integrate with?

Actually, Site Search 360 works with any CMS as long as you can place a JavaScript snippet into the HTML source code of your website template.

But for an even easier and faster integration, we have created several plugins: WordPress, Cloudflare, Drupal, and Lightspeed. The list keeps growing.

Didn't find a plugin for the CMS you're using? Please, let us know and maybe the next one we'll work on will be for you!

FUNCTIONALITY

Does Site Search 360 have autocomplete and search suggestions?

Yes, autocomplete is a built-in feature and it is included in all plans. By default search suggestions appear once you type 3 letters in the search box. The suggestions become more precise as you continue typing.

When you cluster your content into Result Groups, those categories are automatically displayed in the search suggestions. They appear as separate blocks with their own suggestions to the query. Here're a couple examples:

Optimized Elegant Resorts screenshot Site Search 360 suggestions screenshot

Do you support multiple languages?

Yes, you can definitely use Site Search 360 on multi-language websites. 19 languages* are currently supported: English, Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish.

You will need to create an account per language to keep the index and the search results separate from one another. We recommend signing up only once with your "main" language and adding all your other languages to your Managed Accounts. This allows you to easily navigate between the different language versions of your site. You can also rename your accounts accordingly, for example Spanish website instead of website.es.

If your sub-accounts are different language versions of the same site, we offer them at a discounted rate. You won't need to pay for every language separately. Please contact us for a custom offer.

* Didn't find your language in the list? Let us know as we're constantly adding new ones and you can help us prioritize! We will also gladly offer assistance should you decide to streamline the process by providing us with the necessary translations!

If your site's language isn’t officially supported, you can still use Site Search 360 to its full capabilities. You’ll just need to make some manual adjustments to the search, like translate search interface elements (“Show All Results”/“Show More” buttons, “Sort By” dropdown menu, etc.) and add custom synonyms to the project (in order to correct misspellings or let our system know which keywords have the same meaning).

Can I merge search results for a domain and a subdomain into one search?

Yes, we do support cross-domain search and it doesn't matter whether the sites are subdomains of the same main domain or if you are merging completely different domains into one index - Site Search 360 can handle both. Even better: this feature is included in all plans, even the free one.

After configuration, you will end up with a single search field so that your customers can search through the content of multiple websites and subdomains at once.

Does your search work in secure environment?

Yes, there are a few options. You can:
- whitelist our crawler's IP addresses for it to access all pages without login:

  • 88.99.218.202
  • 88.99.149.30
  • 88.99.162.232
  • 149.56.240.229
  • 51.79.176.191
  • 51.222.153.207
  • 139.99.121.235
  • 94.130.54.189
  • 116.202.85.24
  • 88.99.29.101

- provide a special sitemap.xml with deep links to the hidden content
- push your content to our HTTP REST API

In case of HTTP Basic Auth, you can submit username/password to the Crawler settings (click on Advanced Settings). We also support cookie-based authentication.

My organization has strict accessibility requirements. Is Site Search 360 WCAG 2.0 AA compliant?

Yes, we pay special attention to accessibility and we have invested a lot of time and energy to become WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 compliant. You can test our compliancy in any Web testing tool.

Besides scoring 100/100 on Google's Lighthouse accessibility test, we're honored to be chosen as a custom site search engine by Accessibility Developer Guide.

Which file types can be indexed?

Along with HTML files Site Search 360 can index PDF, Word Documents, PowerPoint, Excel, and Open Text Formats when they are linked from your website or listed in your sitemap.

Note: this feature is included in all paid plans as well as in the free trial. If you decide to stick to the Free plan once your trial is over, PDF and other document indexing will be deactivated.

Do you support filters/faceted search?

Yes. Here's an overview of Site Search 360 tools allowing you to add filters and facets to your search results:

  1. Result groups are a quick way to group your content into several big categories such as Products, Blog, News, etc.
  2. Data points are reoccurring bits of information used on your site such as publication date, author, price tags, dates, etc. Extracting this information enriches your search snippets; they can be used globally as well as within a specific content group.
  3. Filters are essential for e-commerce websites as they help quickly funnel down through large result sets with range (such as Price) and multi-select filters (such as Product type, brand, color, size, etc.).
  4. You may place a hidden HTML table in the HTML source code of your pages to add custom filters.
  5. When using our API, you'll first need to set up filters in our control panel and then define them by the auto-generated Filter-ID with the rest of your content uploaded to the API.

Can I use Site Search 360 with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager?

Yes, we support integration of Site Search 360 into your Google Analytics and/or the data layer of Google Tag Manager.

Do you have a server side API? Can I use the API to push content and manually fill the index?

Yes, Site Search 360 has a HTTP REST API which can be used to push pages into the index. The API is easy to use and works with all HTTP enabled programming languages. You can look over the API documentation, view the Postman Collection, or browse examples to see more code to use in your project.

TRIAL, PLANS, AND PAYMENT

How does the trial work? What happens when the trial ends?

All new accounts start with a two-week trial of Batman plan, so you have access to all our features. There is a 5,000 page limit for trial accounts that can be lifted upon your request.

If you do not subscribe to any of the paid plans before your trial expires, your account will be automatically downgraded to the Free plan on the 15th day since the opening of the account. We do not ask for any credit card information during signup, therefore there's no way we can charge you until you decide to go for a paid plan.


When you subscribe to a paid plan, you pay upfront for the first month or the first year of service depending on your subscription choice.

Show monthly or yearly pricing

Note: if you switch plans during trial – even to the free plan – your trial is ended immediately. Purchasing a plan ends your trial, too.

What is branding and less branding?

We never litter your website with third-party ads but we do subtly display our own logo for smaller plans.

  • The Free plan includes the Site Search 360 logo that is shown both under search suggestions and above search results.
  • The Columbo plan has less Site Search 360 branding: the logo is only shown above search results.

Example of branding in search suggestions (Free plan only):

Site Search 360 logo in search suggestions

Example of our logo in search results (Free and Columbo plans):

Site Search 360 logo in search results

To remove Site Search 360 logo you need to upgrade your plan to Holmes or higher. See the full plan comparison table here: www.sitesearch360.com/pricing

Do I have to re-subscribe every month?

No, once you've subscribed to a monthly plan, your payments will be automatic and you will be charged the same day every month for the upcoming period. You can specify any email address(es) in the Invoice recipient field to keep track of all your payments.

What are my payment options?

You can pay by card monthly or annually. All our automatic payments are processed by Stripe. Stripe accepts all major debit and credit cards worldwide but you can double check whether it's the case for you.

When paying annually, you get an automatic 10% discount.

Direct invoicing and payment via bank transfer, check or PayPal is possible but reserved for annual Batman licenses. You can compare plan features at our pricing page.

My website size doesn't fit any of the plans. Is custom pricing available?

Yes, we do offer custom pricing. Once you've signed up for a trial account, you can go to the Plan section and build your own Custom plan. The price is automatically adjusted based on your requirements: how many pages you need indexed, how many monthly queries are expected, how often you'd like your website(s) to be automatically re-crawled, whether there is any YouTube or JavaScript content to index, and other options.

What do the plans cost in other currencies?

All Site Search 360 plans are paid in US Dollars ($). Conversion to your local currency is done using the daily exchange rate from our payment provider.

Do you offer bulk pricing?

No, not yet. We're currently looking at a few affiliate programs, if you think you're a good fit, let us know! If you've integrated Site Search 360 for five or more different clients, get in touch and we'll work out a custom offer for you.

Site Search 360 has the right to change the program policy at any time. 

SITE SEARCH 360 SLA (SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT)

What is your privacy policy? How is my content secured on your servers?

We fully comply with GDPR requirements for protecting your personal data. Site Search 360 does not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise transfer any personally identifiable data with other people/parties without your consent. As a data controller who processes your visitors data on your behalf, we have introduced and pre-signed a Data Processing Addendum (DPA)

All sensitive information you submit is encrypted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and the communication between your site and the Site Search 360 servers is secured via HTTPS request.

Please refer to our privacy policy for further details.

Where are your servers located?

Our servers are hosted in Germany, Canada, and Singapore but we use Cloudflare's Content Delivery Network (CDN) for a faster access: with global distribution your users are always redirected to the closest server.

How fast is Site Search 360?

The service response time is usually between 10 and 100ms (~20ms on average) per request but final times depend on multiple factors out of our control such as the search query and its parameters, user location, and the internet connection speed of the user.


What is your average uptime?

We guarantee that the Site Search 360 API, search, and control panel will have an uptime of at least 99.9% on a monthly average.
Our uptime is monitored by multiple services and multiple servers guarantee redundancy and reduced risk of outages. Our status page provides real-time monitoring so you can check the service availability anytime.

What is your refund policy?

Paid plans are charged monthly or yearly. If you are not satisfied with the service, you can cancel anytime. You will be refunded for paid services if our service was not working.

If you have any questions about our Refund Policy, please send us an email or log into your control panel to use the private contact message option.

LEGAL DOCUMENTS

Here you can find relevant documents regarding Site Search 360° server, payment, hosting etc.