The first thing you want to do is go to your favorite search engines and grab their query string. You can grab it by simply doping a search. Below is a list of the major search engines and the query strings they use:

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=SEARCHWORDS
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&kl=XX&q=SEARCHWORDS
Excite: http://search.excite.com/search.gw?search=SEARCHWORDS&Submit=Search
Hotbot: http://www.hotbot.com/?MT=SEARCHWORDS&SM=MC&DV=0&LG=any&DC=10&DE=2&clickSrc=search&_v=2&OPs=MDRTP
Lycos: http://www.lycos.com/cgi-bin/pursuit?cat=dir&query=SEARCHWORDS
MSN: http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&UN=doc&CO=20&Form=MSNH&MT=SEARCHWORDS
Webcrawler: http://www.webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/WebQuery?searchText=SEARCHWORDS
Go: http://www.go.com/Titles?qt=SEARCHWORDS&col=WW&sv=IS&lk=noframes&svx=home_searchbox

The next thing you want to do is to create your page. Lets start with a simple form, a select box, text box, and submit button. The select box will be used for the search engines, and the text box will be used for the search words.

<center>
<form action="web_search.asp" method="post">
 <select name="selEngines">
  <option value="yahoo">Yahoo</option>
  <option value="altavista">Alta Vista</option>
  <option value="excite">Excite</option>
  <option value="hotbot">Hotbot</option>
  <option value="lycos">Lycos</option>
  <option value="msn">MSN</option>
  <option value="webcrawler">Webcrawler</option>
  <option value="go">Go</option>
 </select>

 <input type="text" name="txtSearchWords" size="30">

 <input type="submit" name="btnSearch" value="Search">
</form>
</center>

When I listed the search engines' querystrings, notice how I marked the "SEARCHWORDS" in blue. This is where we want to place the input from our text box strSearchWords. All you need to do is create a simple If...Then statement with a Response.Redirect that goes to the correct search engine, like I've shown below:

If Request.Form("selEngines") = "yahoo" Then
   Response.Redirect("http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=" & _
                     Request.Form("txtSearchWords"))
End If

Do this for all of the search engines and your all done! (See the code for web_search.asp.)

In the example I also show you how to achieve the same result with radio buttons. You can even go a step further and do check boxes that will allow you to search multiple engines opening a new window for each one!

Enjoy!

Christopher Miller
Kyrakin@excite.com

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