Editors on the Middlebury and MIIS sites can now add a search box to their site that returns results from the current site, or a list of sites you specify. When you click “Add” in the Edit Console in Drupal, you’ll see a new content type named “Google Search”. Choosing this option shows you the following form:
Each URL that you enter will add to the search query using the “inurl” syntax. What this means is that your search results will be scoped to include only those pages that have that text in their URL. In the example above, the search will only return results from the LIS website, the LIS wiki, and the LIS blog. This would leave out the Library, Helpdesk, and Curricular Technology site, so a real example would include those URLs as well.
You don’t have to use the full URL either. You can use a domain, like www.middlebury.edu, to limit search results to just our main website. Or you can use a word, like “fellowships” which will include results from any page with that word in its URL.
The search form that a person visiting your site sees in compact and displays up to eight results as they type their search query, like the new Google Instant search does on Google’s website. Try it out on our News Archives site.
Feedback is welcome, so let me know if you have any questions about this or suggestions for improving this service.
Hi, this looks like a very useful tool. Looking at the News Archive search box, it seems that is currently limited to fairly recent news items? (for example, simply searching on “Clifford” only brings up a few entries, rather than the several that may be expected if one were looking for announcements from previous years’ Clifford Symposia). Google’s search tool is “smart” so it can do inexact matching: searching for “Robison” displays results that don’t contain that word but do contain “Robinson.”
Also, would it be possible, if no results are found, to indicate that? (otherwise, it just looks like nothing happened, and one could keep clicking “Search” thinking there must be something there…)
Again, thanks for this addition to the suite of tools that are available! -Jeff R
Thanks for the feedback, Jeff. The limited results are caused by what most hope is a bug on Google’s end when performing searches against their remote search API using the site: and inurl: filters (http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=27#c18). I’ll keep an eye on the progress of this issue and I’ll add in a note today letting people know when the search results no results.
Will this also search the wiki?
Yes. You can add “http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/” as one of the URLs to include pages from the LIS wiki in the results.