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Looking for a great search tool? Well, you can stop searching now.

CrownPeak, the maker of the CrownPeak Advantage ES hosted content management system, has just unveiled its newest creation: CrownPeak Search. It promises to deliver all the high-end features of the major search tools at a fraction of the cost. Now, even mid-size companies can have top-notch search results.

It's a good buy for intranets, too, but only if your intranet is publicly accessible. Like Advantage ES, CrownPeak Search is a hosted solution, so the remote app will need to spider the contents of your site and keep tabs on the search results. If your intranet is behind a firewall or accessible from outside only by VPN, then CrownPeak Search won't work for you.

But if you can use it, you'll love the advanced functionality that CrownPeak Search offers. The biggest trick up its sleeve is the ability to learn from past searches so that it's continually delivering better results. The tool can learn common word associations; when you search on one term it will know other terms you might be interested in.

CrownPeak Search has a variety of search options that can be turned on or off by the administrator, depending on the kinds of results you want for your site. For example, you can choose to see thumbnails of every page along with the search results. In our increasingly visual society, users might well appreciate being able to see a miniature version of a page before they select it.

You can also choose to display progressive matches. If a user searches the words "end of quarter report," for example, the first results will include that exact phrase, the next ones will include all the words, and the last ones will include some of the words.

If you're an administrator, you'll likely want to turn on the optional spell-checker, but other options are more specialized. For instance, you can turn on a bread-crumb option, which will show where each of the results pages lives on the site, so that when your users get their search results they'll see if the pages are in the area of the site that they're interested in. Another optional tool displays words that are related to the search term. The tool can either learn associations by studying word relations over time, or you can input related words by hand.

Other timesavers include an acronym helper that can either suggest acronyms when you search one of the words than make up the acronym, or suggest the spelled-out version when you search on an acronym itself.

Great searches aren't that useful without great reporting features, and CrownPeak Search has everything an administrator needs to study results and effectiveness. You can easily view the top search terms or which pages are most often clicked on. To help you out, a CrownPeak expert studies your results quarterly and calls to make recommendations.

Pricing for CrownPeak Search starts at $500 a month for small sites with up to 500 pages. Sites with 500 to 20,000 pages pay $1,800 a month. If you have multiple sites, you can join them together for the same basic search fee, although you'll need to pay an extra $200 a month for each extra site.

Search results from CrownPeak Search.