Library clips

Some options of searching your blog and including a search box in your blog

How often is the site re-indexed, most important aspect for blogs?

How well does it index and returns results…and ranking?

This post lists ways to site search your blog.

Built-in search box

Mine isn’t very good, returns are in full-text…I’d rather just the description from the text where the term appears, with the term highlighted (like Google)

Blogs I read

This searches the web, your blog, and your blogroll (OPML export URL) via Google

…another way to search your OPML.

FreeFind

Free to join and they will index your site daily, your own personal search engine.

Google Sitemaps

Ping Google to let them know you have updated your content and they will be alerted to re-index your site.

I just checked mine for the first time in 2 days, and it read last downloaded 6 hours ago, not sure whether you’re meant to continuously ping (re-submit) Google Sitemaps or if it automatically re-indexes

…now to just boost my rankings.

See the post for the low down, Your blog and Google Sitemaps: summary, and note on feeds

Here is a Google Sitemap Video Tutorial

Pinging RSS engines

Technorati Searchlet

Blogdigger-search your blog

Feedster-my feed search

…I’m sure there are plenty of others

Here are some pinging services:

Ping-O-Matic
KingPing
Pingoat
Feed Shark

Social bookmarks

This seems to be a real reliable method of creating a search tool for you blog as you are the indexer (so you can rely on yourself)
…by that I mean you can bookmark a post immediately after you publish an entry, as long as you remember, this is faster than a bot can crawl or RSS can ping
…this is like having a back up version of your blog, browsable by tag, and searchable, and viewed by a different community.

Of course this will only work with services that cache full text, such as Furl, Spurl, and Simpy.

Another great feature is that it enables searching within a category (subject fielded search for your blog)…this is unique compared to the other services
…Simpy even goes further.

The only thing is that these services (not sure about Spurl) don’t offer code to put a search box on your site, and if they did it word be great to include a drop down box of the categories (these would match your blog categories)

…I mentioned some of this a while back.

Question for LazyWeb

I copied code from somewhere on the web for a Feedster search my OPML box, this code was made up by someone as Feedster don’t provide the code themselves

…so I’m wondering does anybody know how to generate code for a search box from Furl, Spurl, or Simpy…drop-down tag menu would be awesome?

Here is the home-made code for the Feedster search my OPML box…if this helps:

<form target=_new name=’feedsterform’ action=’http://www.feedster.com/search.php’><input type=’text’ size=’10′ name=’q'/><input type=’submit’ value=’Search’/><br /><!– <input type=’radio’ value=’inrss’ name=’scope’>My Blog<br /><input type=’radio’ value=’inopml’ name=’scope’/>Blogs I Read–><input type=’hidden’ name=’searchtype’ value=’exsearch’/><input type=’hidden’ name=’inopml’ value=’http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=johnt’/><input type=’hidden’ name=’inrss’ value='’/><input type=’hidden’ name=sort value=’date’/></form>

[ADDED 12/10/05: RawSugar: blog search box and directory]

[ADDED 24/10/05: Swicki: mini-search engine ]

[ADDED 24/10/05: Rollyo: roll your own mini search engine (coming soon!)]

[ADDED 19/12/05: Google Blog Search]

[ADDED 21/05/06 : Simpy search box]