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kristarella.com

kristarella.com

Happiness Engineer at Automattic, lover of knitting, crochet, sci-fi and more

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You are here: Home / Blogging / Google Custom Search Engine

Google Custom Search Engine

17 October 2008 by kristarella

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
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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Filed Under: Blogging, WordPress Tagged With: geek, tools

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Comments

  1. Caitlin says

    18 October 2008 at 07:43

    Wow that’s pretty cool! I hate when I search for something on a site and just can’t find it.

  2. dinu says

    21 October 2008 at 16:56

    this is something that I am planning to do on my blog too.. why don’t you write a gude 🙂 like the coppyblogger one

  3. Arjen says

    24 October 2008 at 01:05

    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:

  4. Sire says

    25 October 2008 at 11:34

    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.

  5. kristarella says

    25 October 2008 at 11:57

    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. 🙂

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