I don’t know about you guys, but I use the search box on my site reasonably regularly. Usually to find posts I remember writing and want to point people to.
I tried to look up “copyblogger” the other day to find Personalising the Copyblogger theme, but had to go through a couple of pages of results because I’ve mentioned Copyblogger since then. Apparently WordPress gives search results in reverse chronological order, with no measure of relevance.
Then today I tried to find WordPress using Coda and Mamp by searching for “mamp”, but it took a while to find.
So I’ve just implemented a Google Custom Search Engine on my site. The results are much more useful!
Custom search results on kristarella.com
I found a post by Aleem Bawany quite useful (for the end part I made a WordPress page and used a page template to insert the search code instead of a page in the root directory). There’s also a video tutorial on CSS Tricks.
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Wow that’s pretty cool! I hate when I search for something on a site and just can’t find it.
this is something that I am planning to do on my blog too.. why don’t you write a gude :) like the coppyblogger one
Yeh, It works better than the search function build in Wordpress. I’ve tried it, but the custom search engine wouldn’t show any results, and my pages are indexed. I think I made some mistakes in the code…
I’ll try it again in the near future, as it really adds something to my blog. :angel:
I’ve used Google custom search on a couple of my blogs and I love it, I just haven’t got to install them on all my blogs, but I will.
It’s definitely a huge step up from the WP search, which just looks for words and lists posts in chronological order.
dinu, the ones I linked to are pretty good, but I’ll consider writing one as well. :)