Friday, September 11, 2009

Blogger Search Sucks

Those of you who have been reading blogs for some years have probably noticed that those hosted by Blogger usually have a search bar up at the top of the page. In theory, you can search the blog for mentions of a specific word or phrase.
It used to be that this search worked just fine, or at least I had no reason to believe it didn't. I used it every so often to locate old posts on my own and other people's blogs, and generally I got more results than I expected.
Over the past few months, however, I began to suspect that this search was simply not functioning properly; I'd search for something that I knew was discussed in a blog somewhere, and yet get absolutely no results, or not the specific post I was seeking. This made me panicky; were my friends deleting some of their old posts, or was I searching using the wrong terms, or what?
This morning I wanted to find what Jesse's old Brno blog had to say about Czech trains and train stations. I knew that Jesse had had quite a bit to say on the topic, so I started by searching for "train."
Not a single post came up. Gadzooks, I thought, can he only have mentioned trains in the plural? I did a search for "trains."
One post came up: a post about trams, which parenthetically calls them "street trains" although in English I've usually called them "streetcars" (A Streetcar Named Desire).
I began to feel a little frantic, and searched on "station." Again, I got one post, this one about the Brno train station. And hey, it used the word "train" right in the first sentence, as well as "trains" later on. Why wasn't this post coming up on my previous two searches? And for that matter, I knew Jesse had also blogged about the Prague main train station, about the train known as the Brnensky drak (sorry, my Czech keyboard doesn't want to work just now), and probably about quite a few other train-related matters.
Jesse began the blog well before Blogger introduced labels, and I don't think he added Delicious tags to each post. My own old blog is partly labeled and also has Delicious tags for quite a few posts, but that still doesn't help me find a lot of the old posts. So the reader really does have to rely on the search function to locate old material. It really has to work, and it just isn't anymore.
This annoys me.

2 comments:

  1. Create an HTML file and put this in it:

    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
     <TITLE>Blog Search</TITLE>
    </HEAD>

    <STYLE type=text/css>BODY {
    SCROLLBAR-FACE-COLOR: #FFFFFF; SCROLLBAR-HIGHLIGHT-COLOR: #000000; SCROLLBAR-SHADOW-COLOR: #000000; SCROLLBAR-3DLIGHT-COLOR: #000000; SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR: #FFFFFF; SCROLLBAR-TRACK-COLOR: #EAEAEA; SCROLLBAR-DARKSHADOW-COLOR: #000000; SCROLLBAR-BASE-COLOR: #FFFFFF
    }
    </STYLE>

    <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#000000" VLINK="#000000" ALINK="#000000">
    <font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">

    <DIV align="center"><div style="width:250px;text-align:left;padding:0px;background-color:#FFFFFF;border:0px solid black;font-size:13px;text-align:justify;">

    <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/custom" target="google_window">
    <table border="0" bgcolor="#EAEAEA">
    <tr><td nowrap="nowrap" valign="top" align="left" height="32"><a href="http://www.google.com/"><img src="http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_25gry.gif" border="0" alt="Google" align="middle"></img></a>

    <input type="hidden" name="domains" value="http://thatsmyskull.blogspot.com/"></input>

    <input type="text" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" value=""></input>
    </td></tr><tr><td nowrap="nowrap"><CENTER><table><tr><td>
    <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="" checked="checked"></input>
    <font size="-1" face="Arial" color="#000000">Web</font>

    </td><td>
    <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" value="http://thatsmyskull.blogspot.com/"></input>

    <font size="-1" face="Arial" color="#000000">Sleestak</font>

    </td></tr></table></CENTER>
    <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search"></input>
    <input type="hidden" name="client" value="pub-13525994706981145"></input>
    <input type="hidden" name="forid" value="1"></input>
    <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1"></input>
    <input type="hidden" name="oe" value="ISO-8859-1"></input>
    <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="GALT:#008000;GL:1;DIV:#336699;VLC:663399;AH:center;BGC:FFFFFF;LBGC:336699;ALC:0000FF;LC:0000FF;T:000000;GFNT:0000FF;GIMP:0000FF;FORID:1"></input>
    <input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en"></input>
    </td></tr></table>
    </form>

    &nbsp;<BR></div></DIV>

    </FONT>
    </BODY>
    </HTML>



    Put the URL of the page here:

    <input type="hidden" name="domains" value="*****"></input>

    Put the name of the page here:

    <font size="-1" face="Arial" color="#000000">******</font>

    ReplyDelete
  2. AAAAGGHH!!!!

    I cant stand it!
    whats that comment up there?
    is that a solution?

    ReplyDelete