Looking For Something?
July 23rd, 2008 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal and regular visitors to this web site know that the search box in this site’s left navigation column does a Google search of this entire web site, making it easy to find just about anything on this site.
And now that my Journal posts (at least all of those since mid-June) are in WordPress, you can also use the WordPress search box in this site’s right sidebar to search through those Journal posts.
But a problem with those options has been that it often takes Google a few days to find new content that I create, so my new Journal posts don’t appear there right away.
Another problem with them is that the default WordPress search feature is not very powerful or helpful.
So, this morning, I turbocharged it, using a new WordPress search plugin called wpSearch. Unlike other WordPress search plugins, wpSearch uses the same incredible underlying search engine that’s used by some of the big search sites. You can read all about it at the wpSearch home page.
I especially like the way that wpSearch instantly adds every new WordPress post to its search index, as soon as I write it. That means that the post that you’re reading right was in wpSearch’s search results as soon as I wrote it.
I also really like the fact that wpSearch search results are displayed in their order of relevancy. For example, because I used the word “looking” in both the title and content of this post, if someone does a search for the word “looking,” this post will appear higher in the search results than any posts that have the word “looking” in their content but not in their titles.
Last night, I exchanged several emails with the author of wpSearch, Kenny Katzgrau. He acknowledges that wpSearch currently doesn’t search through WordPress comments or highlight your search keywords in its search results — two things that the Search Unleashed WordPress plugin can do — but he’s hoping to add both of those features to wpSearch within the next few weeks.
I’ll be eagerly waiting.
UPDATE: It’s mid-afternoon, and I have deactivated wpSearch. Why? Because when I did a search for the word “Scooter,” it returned only one search result, and that was a Journal post about Microsoft that just happened to have a “previous-next” link at the top that led to my Journal post titled “Scooter Finds A New Home.” That’s such a glaring error for a search plugin to make that It was probably caused by some sort of conflict between wpSearch and one of my other WordPress plugins, but I’ve spent so much time configuring and debugging WordPress in the past couple of months that I just don’t have the energy or ambition to try to figure it out.
So I installed Search Unleashed instead. SU seems to be working fine. It has several more configuration options than wpSearch has, and it appears to be finding everything that I tell it to find, both in my Journal posts and in the comments that others have posted after them. SU even highlights the searched keywords within its search results — but unfortunately, it doesn’t sort its search results by relevance. Instead, it displays them in reverse chronological order. That means that if you search for the word “scooter,” Search Unleashed correctly finds my two Journal posts that contain that word, but it lists the newest post first, instead of the post that has the word “scooter” right in its title. That doesn’t matter when there are only two posts that contain the word “scooter,” but it could be a problem if there are 50 posts that contain a different word, for example “bugs”, and the oldest post is the only one that has the word “bugs” in its title. It will end up at the very end of SU’s search results, even though it might be the post that would be the most relevant one to the person who had done the search.
So apparently, my search for the ultimate WordPress search plugin is going to continue for the foreseeable future.
But there’s a real good chance that some friendly competition between wpSearch and Search Unleashed is going to be good for all of us.
UPDATE: It’s early evening, and I’ve corresponded with wpSearch creator, Kenny Kratzgau, a couple more times. In an effort to try to help him troubleshoot the problem that I had experienced with wpSearch, I deactivated Search Unleashed and reinstalled wpSearch. Then I rebuilt its search index (all it takes is one click) and started using wpSearch again. Unfortunately, (fortunately?) no matter what I try, I can’t get wpSearch to act weird again, like it did a few hours ago. I wrote to Kenny and told him that. I haven’t heard back from him yet, but with my limited knowledge of how such things work, I suspect that something somehow corrupted the wpSearch search index and that’s what caused the problem. When I rebuilt the wpSearch search index, that fixed the corruption and solved the problem.
Fortunately. Or unfortunately.
So, since it’s working perfectly again, I’m going to keep using wpSearch, and then when/if it starts acting weird again, I’ll send its “data” folder to Kenny and maybe that will help him figure out what caused the problem once and for all.
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http://www.computerbob.com/wp/looking-for-something.php
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Bugs, Google, Internet, Personal, Pets, Review, Software, Web Development