For no particular reason, searching on blogs, ranked by me. Feel free to correct and add your own rankings in the comments.
The best: Steve Benen’s old blog. Searching at Carpetbagger Report was easy, bug-free and gave results in a useful, intuitive format.
The worst: Steve Benen’s new blog. Washington Monthly drives me crazy. I have never used a site with such a broken search function. The search, when it works, spits a mess of posts in no sensible order, many of which have dubious relevance to the search. Mostly it hangs for an unreasonable period of time before the inevitable error message. The Monthly must have known about this since the early Drum years yet searching is as bad now as it was in 2005. Kudos for supporting first-rate bloggers; boo for tech support.
Honorable mention for the worst: Talking Points Memo. There is a place in hell for the frequent glitch that tells me to wait for failed search #1 to end before I can perform search #2. When will the flywheel stop spinning on search #1? Who knows. Get a coffee and wait. When searches work the chronological order of hits often follows an alternate universe logic.
Most improved: Kos. Before the last update I mostly avoided trying to find old stories on Kos, now the site has become practically a benchmark for convenient searching. Maybe Jeremy Bingham can moonlight for the Monthly once in a while? Seriously.
Then there are blogs that don’t have one. I can get why bloggers who specialize in fast, punchy posts like Atrios and Andrew Sullivan leave the option out. It’s like putting a search in a twitter feed. For other blogs like RedState the absence makes me scratch my head. Their mission statement suggests that RedState wants to be recognized as the rightroots paper of record.
RedState is the leading blog for right of center online activists. Established in May of 2004 by Ben Domenech, Mike Krempasky, and Josh Trevino, RedState has played an integral role in the right’s fight online against the left.
RedState continues to be the most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill and is the most cited right of center blog in the media.
It puzzles me how RedState became the most important online rightwing information source for Capitol Hill when readers have no convenient way to call up posts that scroll off the front page. Taking their marketing at face value (metrics go uncited, but let’s grant the benefit of the doubt) RedState’s primo position may come mostly from the sub-barrel quality of their competition.
Is it more common for rightwing blogs to forego a search function? At first I thought that blocking readers from skimming through a site’s past writings on torture, which is how learned about RedState’s search gap, may be the point. But then NRO could spin its shameful moments into a twelve hour Peter Jackson trilogy (don’t miss the behind-the-scenes featurettes!), yet their search feature is among the best. Instapundit has one. Maybe you, the readers, can help resolve this incredibly important question.
What does all this mean? Not much. Instead of writing about James Bond (good) or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (good, except for a cinematographer who conveyed disorientation, vertigo and nausea a little too well) I am venting about minor tech quibbles on my blog. Tomorrow: my favorite music when I was twelve.
(*) Necessary tech note: I have used Firefox in both Win XP and OSX, although for the last 2 years my internet has happened exclusively through a Mac. Mostly Leopard.
***Update***
As multiple commenters have pointed out, Google searching is always an option. For a couple of reasons built-in search functions, when they work, are a better idea.
For one, full-featured blog searches (ref: Kos, NRO) work much better than Google. Everybody should have them on their blog. Even us.
The other reason is that Google cannot distinguish the text of a blog post from other extraneous wording on the page, including and especially comments. Most intra-blog searches can do that. Since comments run much longer than posts and (let’s be honest, kids) can cover any topic on Earth, sometimes but not always including the point of the original post, I avoid Google whenever I have a choice.
cleek
the Google provides. search thusly:
jnfr
Searching with Google’s "site" tag usually finds me what I want to read.
edit: cleek slipped in there, obviously.
srv
Pretty rich post for a blog that previously had the worst search function evah. I don’t think anyone has tried the new digs search because we have such low expectations.
Where’s that resveratrol update? Big news in the science world and you’re nowhere to be found.
Nicole
My favorite music when I was twelve was Asia. I’m really embarrassed about that now.
And thank you for pointing out Sullivan’s lack of a search function. It makes me nuts and is one of the reasons his site is no longer a daily read for me. Well, that and the case of HDS he had during the primaries.
jake 4 that 1
Agreed. The CR was the first blog I read regularly (and it eventually lead me here). Benen’s move from The CR to The WaMo is like seeing a friend move from a three bedroom WWII Sears prefab in a nice neighborhood to a WWII trailer with an outhouse in a Louisiana swamp. They had some issue a few months ago that resulted in the release of every commenter’s e-mail address. Spammer heaven.
Marvin Humphrey
Full text search is a specialized application, so it’s an add-on for blogging software. The open source tools for full text search are still a little young; they usually need to be tuned and they’re not 100% reliable or portable to every system. It’s my goal to improve that situation as the main developer of KinoSearch and Apache Lucy, and I have lots of competition, so things will definitely get better over the next few years.
MH
Pandagon’s a special case, since their search function WORKS, they just don’t have searchable archives going back more than a few months when they switched domains.
So they have a search function which works, but can’t find 90% of what I’m looking for. o_0
Marvin Humphrey
Google cannot distinguish the text of a blog post from other extraneous wording on the page
Google has to approach each page defensively, assuming that they’re going to be keyword-spammed. For this reason, they can’t differentiate between different types of content on a page; they have to go on a crude measure of visual weight by analyzing html tags.
Individual blogs can assume they’re not spamming themselves, and they can break content into different fields (title, main post, comments, tags) and discard any superfluous text. That gives them a huge advantage when building and tuning a full-text search over generalists like Google.
John Cole
What the hell are you talking about? Yes, the site used to crash all the time when we were linked by the GOS and others because of crappy coding and server issues, but the one thing that ALWAYS worked was our search function. Always. Otherwise I would not be able to find things I had written before and link back to them.
Again, our search function ALWAYS worked. I can’t account for operator error, but one more time, our search function ALWAYS worked.
Tara the antisocial social worker
Maybe Redstate doesn’t want a search function because they’d rather be able to deny yesterday’s talking points when they contradict today’s talking points.
demimondian
I’d be interested in understanding exactly what you’d like to see in a better Google blog search. It sounds like you want to be able to search both including and excluding comments, for instance. Is that correct?
(And, FWIW, John, I use Google to search BJuice. I never could wrap my mind around the way the search box here worked.)
demimondian
Oh, and @srv: Here’s the LATimes summary.
And here‘s the Google query that found it…
Jay C
@John Cole:
John, are you referring to the old RedState site, or the new one? The search function may have "always worked", but since they "upgraded" a few month ago, the site’s functionality* has degraded considerably, IMO.
Maybe it’s a time-bomb left by all those "left-wing coders" they tried hard to avoid in their upgrade……
*its utility as a source of anything but echo-chamber bile has been steadily degrading for years.
Screamin' Demon
That’s why I use "[email protected]." I’m not stupid enough to leave my real address at any blog.
NonyNony
@Jay C:
Actually, I’m fairly certain that John was referring to srv’s ding on THIS site’s search capabilities, not Red State’s. And this site’s search capability has always seemed decent enough for what I need it for.
Jay C
@NonyNony:
Ooops! A quick re-read leads me to believe that you’re right. Sorry.
Oh well, no post is truly wasted if it includes a dump on RedState...
john b
i use google reader’s search frequently. the google blog search works well too. why bother with having to remember if a blog’s search function works or not?
srv
@John Cole:
You can call me stupid, but demi isn’t stupid. I always had to use google also. I typically would be trying to find something around a date, and not a post title, because I wanted to see what you said about a particular event.
Searching on ‘Schaivo’ you could end up with a 300 different posts across a span of topics. You could probably find them because you could remember the title (which while always wonderfully snarky, they don’t have any keywords in them).
Observer
Sully also gets a rap for not having comments. I swear, he’s as lazy as a beagle… :)
Punchy
@Tara the antisocial social worker: What she said, and needs to be bolded, italicized, and blockquoted.
This is EXACTLY why they dont have a search function. How can they be proven to be hypocrites when no one can "prove" what they said the day/week/month before?
Face
No offense to anybody, but I so rarely care what any of you said 1 hour ago, let alone days ago, that I really couldn’t care two shits about a functional search feature.
Blogs are all about the now, not the last week.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
See now, this is a subject you have to bring up, and Redstate never spent much time considering because, as I’m sure you guessed it, their attention span is just that short.
John Cole
@srv: No, Demi’s complaint is that it does not give him back the results he wanted- in other words, it does not run all the algorithms that the google search engine does to produce the “right” result.
However, the search feature has always worked here. you put a key word in, press search, and it will find it.
Period.
HankP
For bigger and/or custom designed sites, it’s poor planning or poor programming. For most smaller blog sites, it’s whatever search function their software supports. WordPress has always had a pretty good search function. Drupal has a horrible search function which is greatly improved in v6. Scoop always had a good search function. Most smaller bloggers don’t have the time or money to modify the function that comes with their blogging software.
dmsilev
Nitpick:
Jeremy didn’t write the new GOS search engine, though he probably maintains it now. It was implemented by a DK user who goes by the handle ‘jotter’, as noted by the announcement of the new search engine.
Yours in pedantry,
-dms
les
Somewhere close to worst: Yglesias. Results aren’t limited to his blog, aren’t ordered by date or any other discernible metric, and don’t apparently need to actually include the search term.
srv
@John Cole:
Uh, my complaint, "worst function evah" would be no function beyond a single word search, and function that doesn’t work. You see, in 2008 on the intertubes, there’s sort of an expectation beyond grep.
To wit, using your still craptastic search: balloon-juice.com/?s=Darrell
Returns about a dozen hits.
Google site:balloon-juice.com Darrell
returns 870.
Your concept of ‘always’ is warped. Period.
cdc
Fascinating how RedState’s mission is apparently to get into online "fights" with the left.. Compare with DailyKos:
Kos is apparently about community and political change, not just fighting with the other guys…
Sure, it’s just spin, but it tells ya something about who’s making an actual impact..
Conservatively Liberal
I like to use "[email protected]" or "[email protected]". ;)
cleek
ObsidianWings’ search engine does that, too. search for something you’d expect to see a lot of, like "Paulson" and you get exactly one hit, to a lighting company: "Louis Poulsen Lighting". and it’s a "sponsored" link from Atomz.
cleek
their posting rules used to say explicitly that RS was a site by and for conservatives to talk about conservative issues and to help foster conservative politics, and that anyone who wasn’t contributing to that end would be banned. in other words: liberal points of view were not welcome.
of course, liberal points of view are still not welcome, but it’s only implied (by the actions of the
moderatorsbanners) now.carsick
TPM is the only site I visit that also regularly freezes my laptop with Vista as the OS. Regularly meaning every time.
I hate Vista.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Oh, must we really go there? I think that Darrell is best forgotten.
Octavian
I think you guys need to take another look at Sullivan’s site. It does indeed have a search function, and a rather good one at that. You really can’t miss it — it’s in bold blue letters, saying "SEARCH THE DISH." Granted, it wasn’t there before the redesign, but it’s there now.