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Site Tweak: Finding Stuff
21 May 2024
We've just tweaked our Find command that searches Photo Corners for you. We made two little improvements, in fact.
PRIORITIES
The first is that we reordered the options in the pulldown menu.
We put our own code first and selected the 18-month option, on the theory that you'll want to find something you saw within that time frame. It takes about 20 seconds to report what it finds.
You can do fast finds with just the current year or slower ones that search the whole site. But we felt 18 months is a good compromise.
We moved the generic search sites (Bing, Brave, Duck Go Go, Google) down below that. We're more than a little disappointed in their failure to retrieve anything more than partial results. Although Google returns nothing at all.
If you've been following our monthly archive stories, you know we've blocked Google from indexing Photo Corners because it continually downloaded the entire site repeatedly. So it's not reporting anything on Photo Corners.
A FILTER
The second tweak we made is somewhat irrelevant because of that. We added the magic "udm=14" to the end of Google search URLs. As Ernie Smith explains in Does One Line Fix Google?, "It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the 'More' menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books."
Smith explains how to set that up as your Google default search. Which we did for our Arc browser. And we liked it so much, we're sharing the trick with you.
As we said, it won't affect Google searches of Photo Corners but if you implement it for your browser, it will feel like a breath of fresh air.
CONCLUSION
It's just astonishing to us how helpful utilities like search engines have become so corroded that they are all now at best incompetent and at worst misleading.
Only a few years ago, a search of a site like ours would retrieve results like our own code produces. It would report complete results from the thoroughly indexed data.
No longer.
Our own code does not use an index so it's noticeably slower. But it's a real time search of the entire site. So even the latest, non-indexed stories are included. It's a complete search.
Which sadly, we can't say about any other method.