Installed the free search on my site and it doesn't work. Gives results, but they have no relation to the search term and in fact offer links to old 404 .html pages which are not on the server any more. Most of the site is .php now. Huh? What am I doing wrong. Entered the google api number, etc. It is doing something and giving some results. Just not good ones. Can anyone help?
The search engine script is based on the Google index, so its only going to return results that Google knows about.
Yes the url is http://www.tripletmedia.com/herronhill/ I understand that maybe the googlebot hasn't crawled the site to reindex the redesigned pages but I don't understand why the results returned have no relevance to the search term - appears not to be searching at all but just returning a set of all the links it has to pages on that site. is it because the new site is .php? or something else?
Something else.. You have the choice when you create the search box to have Google search or site search. Google search searches the internet, site search tries to find something on your site that matches. You are set for Site search, so it returns links to your site. Google appears to be confused because you deleted a lot if not all of the pages it has listed for you. I see another problem, all the pages that are returned are old pages. If I were you I'd do a 301 redirect on all of those pages to a similar page that you now have, that way you don't lose people that may have linked to those pages and also the PR attached to them.