In a recent survey MarketingSherpa found a 50-50 split in the way people like to navigate around a site. Half like menus, half prefer search.

It depends somewhat on the type of product. Shoppers who want to compare what’s available will tend to use menus to find the category of product they’re looking for. Those who know what product they’re looking for like to just type it into a search box and go directly to it.

We asked our in-house programming guru what he would recommend as a tool to search the content of small-business websites and he suggested Google Custom Search, which creates “a customized search experience for your own website.”

You can find it at http://www.google.com/coop/cse. And of course, being Google, it’s free. So you can have all that sophisticated search functionality your potential customers are looking for… and they’ll stick around longer.