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New Windows Tips Search Engine: Winfind

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rogerd

1:25 pm on Feb 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member



According to an article in the current (paper) Infoworld, columnist Brian Livingston has started a Windows tips search engine that incorporates results only from sites deemed to be reliable. The effort grew out of his frustration with ineffective or even dangerous fixes and tips unearthed in general search engines. About 22K pages are indexed so far. (He acknowledges that these days a web search is much faster than rooting through manuals for tech answers. Personally, I haven't used Microsoft's KnowledgeBase search feature in ages - too frustrating, and terrible search results. Google's faster & better.)

The new SE, which can be found at www.briansbuzz.com, is powered by Atomz. My experience with Atomz is that it delivers decent results, although I've used it only on single sites with relatively consistent page structures. How it will fare when pulling results from multiple sites will be interesting. If one of the sites has good page structure (proper titles, metas, content), will it always appear ahead of similar, or even better, content on other sites? This is the dilemma that web search engines have to deal with that site-search engines like Atomz don't.

I tried to find the article on the Infoworld web site, but it didn't show up in the Google-powered search. :(

hakre

2:17 pm on Feb 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



this atomz search is not worth a cent in my opinion. does this guy adds all trick-pages to the engine by hand? otherwise, this website is a package of hot air only. letting atomz crawl the sites you can select yourself. don't like it. a kind of meta-search would be a cooler and more useable website for a trick search.

Xoc

7:31 pm on Feb 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I was just thinking this morning that it would be really useful to be able to target a search to just .NET related sites. Then it struck me that Google allows you to search within results. So I created a web page on my site that first has a dropdown list of just the .NET terms I'm most likely to search within: ASP.NET, Visual Basic, C#, etc. Then it has a search box. When the submit button is clicked, I construct the correct Google query and Response.Redirect to Google to get the results.

The critical standard ASP (haven't switched my site to ASP.NET yet) code is below. Name the web page netsearch.asp.

<%
If Not IsEmpty(Request("ddlWithin")) Then
Response.Redirect("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=" _
& Server.URLEncode(Request("ddlWithin")) & "&as_q=" & Server.URLEncode(Request("txtSearch")) _
& "&btnG=Search+within+results")
Response.End()
End If
%>
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<form name="frmInput" id="frmInput" method="get" action="netsearch.asp">
Search within:
<select name="ddlWithin" id="ddlWithin">
<option value='"asp.net"'>ASP.NET</option>
<option value='"visual basic"'>Visual Basic</option>
<option value='"c#"'>C#</option>
</select>
<input type="text" id="txtSearch" name="txtSearch" size="50" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>
</body>
</html>

[edited by: Xoc at 7:47 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2003]

brotherhood of LAN

7:36 pm on Feb 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



That's pretty neat Xoc, people keep saying to stop re-inventing the wheel and G does the job.

Maybe as an add on you can put in all the keywords from your google referrals into there (sorted by popularity maybe) :)....you might end up at the top for most of them but itll expose all the other sites/pages that were close to beating you.

//added, that is, if your site is all about .NET of course :)

Xoc

8:21 pm on Feb 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The concept can, of course, be generalized to any topic, not just .NET. It's a way of constructing category specific search pages.