How Do You Quickly and Easily Search for Something on a Blog?
Visited 1839 Times Published by Rico May 30th, 2007 in Blogging, How and Internet.Yes, all blogs have a built-in search function. But I’ve always found them relatively slow. At least compared to the major search engines.
That’s right, you can use them to search through blogs much more quickly than their own built-in search features. Both Google and MSN make this easy for you:
In the search box, type in what you want to look for, followed by a space, then followed by site:[domain], where [domain] is the website you want to limit the search to.
(Ignore Yahoo, because they insist on bringing you to an advanced search page, instead of letting you specify your query as you type it out)
For example, let’s say I wanted to search for “Filipino” on Fool for Five. Instead of using the blog’s search (located on the upper right just below the header), you can just go to MSN or Google and type Filipino site:fool45.com into the search box. You’ll find that Google and MSN beat the built-in search, hands down. Why is that?
This probably has something to do with the fact that search engines store copies of a blog, updating them every so often (a process called caching). When a looker comes along, the search engine gets the most recent copy, and pulls out the relevant stuff. By default.
Compare this with the built-in search. Every time it’s asked to look for something, it has to look through each and every post of the blog. It’s still quick, no doubt about it, but it can’t beat the much more effective technique of the search engine.
There’s one drawback to using search engines. Remember when I said they store copies of a site? Since search engines take a while to store new copies of a website, the latest posts may not be included in the search. If you’re reading this post on the day it was published (May 30, 2007), try searching for the title. Chances are, this post won’t be listed as one of the results—yet.
In the end, it’s a trade-off between speed and accuracy.
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7 Responses to “How Do You Quickly and Easily Search for Something on a Blog?”
- 1 Pingback on Aug 12th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Depending on the blog, I sometimes do away with the “site:” operator. But yeah, I use google to search content on other blogs. The most recent one I did was “yugatech full vs partial feeds” and you can guess why.
I even use google to search my own blog especially if I wanted to find out the URL when I remember the title.
Yes, exactly! For some reason, search engines also processes the words better than the built-in search, not letting a word it can’t find invalidate the whole search string (meaning “rico blogs at fool for six” will still produce results even if “six” won’t be found).
Incidentally, I also believe you should use full feeds.
Unless you wanna make life hard for your subs.
What about installing Google Search on your blog like I did?
As for searching sites, typically (at least on WP sites), adding “/search/[search term]” to the address lets me skip the search box (especially if I can’t find it).
So if you wanted to search for Rico on this blog, I’d visit http://fool45.com/search/Rico right? Now that I didn’t know! I’ve always used http://www.fool45.com/index.php?s=Rico, which is definitely more cumbersome. Thanks for the heads-up!
Yup! That’s the idea.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce