31 March 2008
It's time to talk search engines... no, wake up... please!
There are many ways of building search engine systems for web sites but technologies we've used in the past, such as Microsoft's Index Server, look at all the files residing on the server, some of which may be out of date. Hopefully, the Google approach will make life easier because it searches the 'published' site. This has the added benefit of including database-driven content too!
Now this all sounds great but we have hit upon a few issues already. The Google system seems to have a few bugs, one of which we discovered last Friday. We have set things up so that Google returns the search results in XML format. Unfortunately Google only estimates the number of search results, which isn't much use if you want to build a 'paging' system. Anyway, without getting too technical, we have added some extra code to try and get a correct search results total - and it appears to be working at the moment!
So... the search system is up and running on our site but we're giving it BETA status for now. We'll keep you posted as to any performance issues. In the meantime, why not have a go and search our site? Enjoy!
Posted by Mike at 8:55 AM
2 Comments:
-
marketing said...
This sounds really interesting. How about if the user searches 'Web Design + Consultancy', which I'm guessing is more likely? Lets get you guys to the top of that too! :) Rob, Marwell.
12:08 PM -
Nick Warren said...
Thanks Rob... all in good time :-)
- Nick
2:14 PM