Can I capture Google searches on my site?

Well, the answer is "yes and no". You can indeed capture the searches people do through a custom Google search box on your site, but it's a bit tricky and you need something that many people don't have, which is the ability to run custom CGI scripts on your Web server.

The basic idea would be that instead of having the search form pointing directly to Google, it will point to a script on your site that captures their search term then hands the search itself along to Google, all in a fraction of a second.

The script has the following line for the search box:

But if we change that to, say, action="http://www.myserver.com/savesearch.cgi", now we can write that script. Make it a rudimentary shell script and it would look like this:

Assuming you have everything set up properly, including the log file being writable by a script launched by the Web server, that's all you would need to be able to have a file called "searchbox.log" that stores all the search patterns people use.

If you prefer Perl, C, or some other scripting language you can definitely accomplish the same with those languages, perhaps even more efficiently, but this gives you a sense of the basic methodology you'd want to use and how it could integrate into your site.

Again, though, let me warn you that it's a lot more complicated than just adding a few lines to a Web page, and if you're not already comfortable monkeying with scripts on your Web server -- and have a Web server that will let you do that! -- then this might not be a good solution for you. Check with your Web hosting provider, they'll be able to let you know if this is something you can do or not!