Comments on: Matt Mullenweg’s Blog Photo Matt - Unsearchable

By: justcurious

justcurious — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:17:33 +0000

@ 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?

By: moeffju

moeffju — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 01:58:29 +0000

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.

By: chewie

chewie — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:44:49 +0000

@ 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.

By: mr.squeaky

mr.squeaky — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:44:05 +0000

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.

By: moeffju

moeffju — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:58:16 +0000

Just append ?s=search terms to the URL, as with any WP blog. Site-internal searches are not that useful anyway.