I love to read Photo Matt, the blog of blogs by Wordpress founding father Matt Mullenweg. If you use Wordpress, you probably know of Matt’s blog from the headline feeds in your dashboard.
My biggest complaint about Photo Matt is that it is next to impossible to search the rich content Matt has been generating for years because, for whatever reason, Matt doesn’t have a search box on his blog. Go figure.
I’ve looked several times to make sure I didn’t miss it. If there is some other fancy way to search the blog on-site (not via Google or some other off-site method) let me know. I even tried clicking the coffee cup a couple of times because I thought that would be a cool place to hide a secret search box!
If you stumble around Matt’s blog long enough (which you’re apt to do because you can’t search it!), you can find a search box under the photos tab but that search box only searches photos on the site.
I think most accomplished themers and website developers would agree that a search box is a fundamental element for any content driven site, so there has to be a reason why the man who is the founding developer of Wordpress doesn’t want a search box on his site.
It just better be a damn good reason.
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Just append ?s=search terms to the URL, as with any WP blog. Site-internal searches are not that useful anyway.
moeffju on June 1st, 2007 at 9:58 am | Link
I don’t know. I like going to a site, and seeing a search blank, and typing in a word, and getting to where I want to be fast.
Expecting a user to append a ?s=search to the end of a URL isn’t my idea of functional design.
@ moeffju - You can’t possibly be serious, can you? Sure, appending ?s to the url will work but is that something a user should have to do to search a blog?
This would be way at the bottom of user friendly things to force upon a visitor.
moeffju said:
[quote]Site-internal searches are not that useful anyway.[/quote]
What are you talking about? How else are you supposed to access 5 years of content rich archives on a great blog like Matt’s? Please don’t tell me the trick about limiting my Google search to a single site. This is less user friendly than the original suggestion.
Bottom line - it’s very unusual to leave a search box off of a website. There must be a reason why Matt does it.
Of course I’m not serious. Matt obviously didn’t think a site-internal search would be useful. If you absolutely must have one, hitting Ctrl-L and typing ?s=search term is surely not much more work than clicking a search box?
I don’t see the need for site internal searches for blogs. If the content is good, just google for it and you shall find it. Or you might find better content. Or, if you absolutely want only content from that site, click Advanced Search. Using the site: operator with Google is not a trick, there’s even a form for that.
I don’t see any reason to have a search box on a blog, but you obviously disagree. It might be “unusual” in this web 2.0 world, where search is the primary way to access anything, but… yeah.
moeffju on June 8th, 2007 at 6:58 pm | Link
@ moeffju, just curious - if you don’t “see the need for site internal searches for blogs” why do you have a site internal search box of your (very nice) blog?
justcurious on June 8th, 2007 at 8:17 pm | Link