Friday, June 5, 2009

Search Functionality Added

We've recently added a Site Search box to the sidebar on the right hand side of the site. For those of you who read via an RSS reader, this will of course be of no use at all. But for those of you who actually click through to the site, you now have an additional way to cut through the archives. Our Index only takes into account top level mentions and categories in any one of our posts; to see all the secondary references (including those in the comments), the Site Search will be a better tool. A search for "Weston" brings up 18 posts, even though there are only 3 indexed Edward Weston posts and none for Brett Weston or the Weston Gallery. You get the picture.

The results of your search are displayed at the very top part of the page (in a box that can be closed), so you may need to scroll up to find them, depending on where you begin the search on the page. There are two tabs: This Blog (mentions only on DLK COLLECTION) and Linked From Here (mentions on sites linked from DLK COLLECTION). Both can provide a very targeted view of your desired topic. Clicking on More Results will open a traditional Google search window with all the items in one place (the numbered paging at the bottom seems to be less than perfectly functional unfortunately).

Most importantly, if you found our site via a Google search, but the link didn't seem to make any sense or it brought you to some page that wasn't immediately obvious as to why it was relevant, try the Site Search, as there may very well be just the post you were looking for buried in the archive, but the keyword importance somehow got garbled along the way (we're too small for any fancy search engine optimization). Happy searching!

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