Blog > March 2008 Blog archive

Searching Semantic... BETA

31 March 2008

It's time to talk search engines... no, wake up... please!

In the name of research we have decided to use our site to test Google's Custom Search Engine system. What is it? Basically, it's a way of harnessing the awesome power of the Google search algorithm and presenting the results within the design and structure of your own web site. It's a 'paid for' service but we think it could be very beneficial for some of our customers - so we're testing it out with our site.

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used in the past, such as Microsoft's Index Server, look at all the files residing on the server, some of which may be out of date.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 3 comments

Leckie and Leckie 2008 goes live

18 March 2008

Phew... after a good deal of work the new Leckie & Leckie web site is now live. Here's the launch homepage for your delectation.

Thanks to Sarah and the team at Leckie for making this such a fun project for us. We've had a great time... and look forward to building on the site in the coming months. Well done all.

Posted by Nick Warren at 2:57 PM 0 comments