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A special STC search engine |
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Written by Nick Rosenthal
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Wednesday, 10 October 2007 |
Lou Quillio is one of the clever chaps behind the STC Forum. Back in March 2007, he came up with a special search engine that works only on STC websites. In this age of information overload, it sometimes helps narrow down the search results.
Here's an experimental tool that seeks to make STC a smaller and more knowable place, a tool I hope you'll find valuable and can maybe help extend:
Search STC World
What It Is
It's a page on this site where you can search content on one hundred twelve STC sites exclusively. It contains no advertising, costs nothing, and won't redirect you anywhere else.
How It Works
The Search STC World page uses scripts provided by Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE). Queries consider a custom search engine I compiled this morning, from data here. I compiled the list of sites manually, but the Google CSE tool will also accept the list as OPML data (discussed elsewhere).
What Can You Do With It?
Search every public STC website in one step, including the forum and STC.org. No other sites will appear in the results. Since Google indexes PDFs and MS Office docs, your search results should include newsletters and other non-HTML content. If your site houses and links to publicly-available mailing list archives, they're in too.
Try it. Do a query on AuthorIT or Brierley, or some other interesting subject.
The usual Google query parameters are in play, too. You might first do a query on XML, then decide to limit the results to the UK Chapter site:
XML site:stcuk.org
Of course, that'll work on Big Google, too.
Who Decides What's Included?
Me, at the moment, because it's based on one of my custom search engines. But anybody can make their own and do the same thing, for their personal use or to share. I've been wanting to do this since hearing of Rollyo, but they have a fifty-site limit. Google does let you give others permission to work on your CSE list, so there's collaboration potential. Or maybe someone else will do a better implementation than the quick one I made today.
Any Other Cool Stuff?
Always. If you use a Google homepage or Google Desktop, you can add this search. You can put it on your website. I'm sure you can add it as a custom search engine in Firefox or that other thing. |
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