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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Reviews of photography products that enhance the enjoyment of taking pictures. Published frequently but irregularly.
An Improved Text Search
14 August 2013
When we designed this site, we thought it would be silly to write our own software to search the site for specific text. Isn't that what Google is for? It is but it turns out that Google doesn't update it's database as often as we publish. So the results of a Google search on our site are almost always incomplete.
We know this because we like to search our own site. A lot. And the Google search implemented on our Archive page, while flattering, was disappointing.
So we did reinvent the wheel. But we made it a pneumatic tire. It's much faster than the Google search was because it doesn't have the overhead of a database. And it's more complete because it doesn't index, so as soon as something is dropped on the site, it can be found.
You can use it simply by just typing in the text you want to find (like "Lightroom") or you can make it more interesting using regular expression syntax (like "Johnson | Johnston"). Case is ignored.
The search is limited to our news articles, skipping the headline and index pages.
And results are reported in reverse chronological order so the newest items are first. We find that the most useful, but if you'd like some flexibility it's no problem to offer an option to reverse the order. After all, we wrote the software -- and you're the boss. So just let us know.
You can find the text search form on our Archive page, where it replaces the old Google form. They look the same. But this one works a lot better.