Website search

Hi Farnham,

How about adding a new field to each of your sections called "specialty"?

One of the easiest and best ways to add search capabilities to your site is to use [url http://www.google.com/sitesearch/]Google Site Search[/url].

Please let me know if this helps or if you need a different solution.

Thanks, Chris. I'll try the "specialty" field for each section and see if I can search all of them from one form on the home page. That would be great. I'll let you know if (when?) I get it to work.

Farnham

Fleff, did you ever get a site-wide search working on your site? I need to build one and can't seem to find any information on achieve a site-wide search. I don't want to use google's site search, so if you can share your solution, I'd really appreciate the help.

Zickey

Zickey,

I haven't gotten there yet. The site still has a long way to go. There are others out there who know much more about this than I do and maybe one of them will read this and get back to you. I'm also working on another CMSB website where it's more likely I could use a site-wide search. If I come up with anything, I'll let you know.

fleff

I know it's an older post but wanted to toss in a quick comment. Google site search is only as relevant as the number of times/frequency googlebot spiders your site and ranks the data it pulls. On newer sites or sites with little traffic or infrequent data changes - it just doesn't cut it the way you would expect it to. IF the googlebot recrawled the site at least daily or several times per day, then it would be MUCH more effective and efficient. This is why so many of us want to have a search function through CMSB on the sites we build - because all of our searchable/desirable data is stored right in the MySQL database and it's fast to get. The problem is having to build a search function for each site or as the site changes (read 'new sections added'), etc. If there are sections that relate to other sections this can be very difficult - especially for neophytic programmers such as myself. It's a constant retooling process and the code strings can get very long on manually coding the search parameters.

Our customers need a CMSB-based fully-searchable function plugin. Our customers site visitors need true site search capability powered by the site's own database and CMSB functions. As programmers we need to be able to do this readily and easily with CMSB >> therefore some type of comprehensive plugin is long overdue and we are constantly begging for it. Of course, it can be a daunting task to build such a plugin but building it so that the CMSB site programmer can pick/choose the setup parameters based on the sections and datatypes built into the CMSB site core could make it a terrific plugin.

Thanks for listening. Still LOVE this product, the service and the great attitude from the IT team! Just begging for a couple more core plugins that will ice the cake and make CMSB a more universally able tool.

Hi Equinox,

I'll pass that along -- but just wanted to mention that on many sites, Google is *extremely* fast: My own site is on roughly a half hour delay from Google. :)

Hi Donna, are you stating that Google bot arrives at and indexes your site every half hour? Is it a classified sales site? what kind of site and are you changing the data that regularly?

MingyQ,
Have a look at the thread below. Dave provided a nice multipleSearch.php file to help get people started building their own site side search engines. I'm using in on a few different sites and it works very nicely.

http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=61466&

Zick