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An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

How to add a site

Find it in the Admin Center: Search.gov Home > Admin Center > Add Site

Homepage URL

Tell us the homepage URL of your website. Enter a fully qualified URL, including the protocol, such as https://www.example.gov.

Correct syntax

  • https://www.ssa.gov
  • https://usa.gov
  • https://stemcells.nih.gov

Incorrect syntax

  • usa.gov (use https://www.usa.gov)
  • www.nasa.gov (use https://www.nasa.gov)
  • https://www.sec.gov/litigation.shtml (use the higher-level folder, https://www.sec.gov/litigation)
  • https://www.gsa.gov/portal/category/100000?utm_source=OCM&utm_medium=print-radio&utm_term=&utm_campaign=shortcuts (use the higher-level domain, https://www.gsa.gov)
  • http://www.doc.gov (use the domain that resolves, https://www.commerce.gov)

Display name

Display Name and Site Handle on NIH.gov's search results pageTell us the name of your website. Searchers see your display name on the results page, such as in your page title or best bets. We recommend using the plain language name for your agency or site, such as National Institutes of Health.

Site handle

Your site handle is a unique identifier for your site. The site handle is included in the request you send us from your search box, to let us know which search site to use. We also include it in the URL of your search results page, again, to show which search site is being used. We recommend making this handle short and unique, such as nih.

Handles can have lowercase letters, numbers, periods, hyphens, and underscores only. They can’t have spaces and other punctuation.

Site language

English is the default language for our results pages. If you will be searching against content in another language, you should choose another language for your search site — we support English, Spanish, and 69 other languages.

  • If you select English, results will primarily include English-language pages. All display text on the results page will also be in English.
  • If you select Spanish, results will primarily include Spanish language pages. All display text on the results page will also be in Spanish.
  • If you select one of the other 69 languages, results will include pages from the selected language when possible. Display text will be in the selected language when localizations are available, and in English when they’re not available.

For non-English sites, you can include the specific location of the language’s content (such as example.gov/language or language.example.gov) in your domains to further refine the search results. We recommend testing the results for your non-English site with both the general example.gov and the language-specific location to determine which setting gives you the best results.

We’ve published the localization files on Github, and we encourage you to contribute to them.