In the year-plus that I've had this blog, I've been frustrated by the lack of a decent site search. Here are snapshot reviews of the 13 widgets I tested today in looking to meet a simple need: a simple text entry search interface with clean, up-to-date results on the content in my blog. You'd think this would be easy, but it's not. Take a look at how these site search contenders matched up:
The original matchup: Google vs. FreeFind
- Google. Inaccurate or empty set results, which is a nonstarter. Better to have no search at all. Also, you have to paste in code rather than simply adding a widget.
- FreeFind. Highly accurate results, and a results page that is off-site but takes you there gracefully. Unfortunately, you must wait for FreeFind to spider your site before content shows up in the results, and the results are messy. e.g., ten result pages are listed for a single post, since each post is listed ten times in the "recent posts" sidebar before it rolls off. Also must be coded in.
Take 2: the Typepad Widget Gallery
Today, I tried again in a live environment - if you were surfing this blog today, you saw (and hopefully were amused by) the search widget changing from brand to brand. None of these met my basic need, but here's a quick rundown of the Typepad search widgets that I tried:
- Blogbar. A variety of search box templates are nice, but not editable. Results are of good quality, but the returning of results is very slow. In addition, search results pop up in a separate window as a somewhat messy list. It's obvious that you have left the original site.
- Gada.be. This searches the tags, not the actual content. Well enough, but not what I actually needed.
- Kosmix. Searches the web (and in theory your blog) for information on politics, travel, and health. Not much help, since I don't blog on these topics.
- MeeVee. Search box so that you can see what TV shows I like. Interesting if I want to talk about Battlestar Galactica and Grey's Anatomy, but I typically don't.
- PreFound. Sends searchers to a page with results on the search topic that other surfers have liked at other web sites. Interesting aggregation play, but again...not touching my own blog content, unless I am lucky enough to have all of my content searched and rated by other PreFound users.
- Rollyo. Lets readers search the sites that I think are relevant to my site, but the interface doesn't really allow for a simple search of my own site. (Too bad, since it was clean to set up otherwise.) [Update: I went back and tried this again per comments, but the Rollyo widget failed to find any results for the 'blogbar' search below.]
- Sphere. By its description, this would have been my favorite - it would list results from my site, as well as results from other sites. In practice, it failed to come up with any results for my own site. But in some searches, it would show a result from my site mixed in with the results from other sites. Strange behavior, but there's no Help on the Sphere web site or in Typepad's knowledge base for troubleshooting.
The last gasp: Widgetbox
Since the gallery didn't pan out, I ventured over to Widgetbox and tried out a few of their offerings. I tried out the ones that seemed most promising:
- BaynoteGo! This looks simple and their ad copy is appealing, but I'm still waiting for the initial crawl of my Web site - which makes me wonder if results will be less current, a la FreeFind. Though simple for the tech-savvy, it does require inserting a code snippet into the Widgetbox configuration tool.
- Google. Yes, Google again - Widgetbox has a widget for site-only search that doesn't require Google integration. A search on "China" brought up results at least four days old, since the post mentioning "China" rolled off of my home page last Friday.
- Swicki. The setup interface for this, and the concept of community-informed results, got my hopes up. But the results on searches didn't include my blog content.
- Yahoo!. Results were reasonably accurate, but the redirect to search results was inelegant. And Yahoo! crams in a bigger logo than Google Does. But in a side-by-side test with the Google widget, this "China" search correctly brought up the post's permalink, not the home page that the post rolled off of on Friday. Strangely, adding Yahoo! search directly through Yahoo! required many extraneous steps, so I quit their process to go through Widgetbox instead.
[ORIGINAL DECISION] After all of this trial and error (and public search schizophrenia), the best of the bunch was Yahoo! via Widgetbox - acceptable results and a simple-to-add widget. This being said, I'll still give BaynoteGo! a try once the indexing turns up.
[NEXT-DAY UPDATE] In response to comments on this post, I tried out the Technorati Searchlet as another site search option. To test this, I loaded all three of these search snippets onto my blog, then searched on "blogbar" - text that only shows up in this particular post - for a head-to-head comparison.
- Freefind: Found the post, gave me all four pages that it shows up on (home page, permalink, category page, archive page). 11 seconds to return the result.
- Technorati Searchlet: Found the post, and gave me the actual permalink page rather than the clutter of duplicates. Very obvious change from my site, since the results page is highly Technorati-branded. The searchlet is in beta, but I still would have expected Six Apart or Technorati to provide a widget for this simple function rather than having to paste code snippets. Just 4 seconds to return the result.
- Yahoo! - my original top choice - did not find this post, probably because Yahoo! has not crawled here in the last 24 hours. 10 seconds to return the empty set result.
Based on these results, I'm revising my original recommendation: Technorati's searchlet met my simple search needs best, though I'd still like to provide simple search without redirecting visitors to another site.
