Google Search?

S

spyder10

Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
672
With all these problems why not add a simple(I'm sure it really isn't that simple) "Search this site with Google box". I know tons of other sites on the web that use this, and it would allow anyone to search and not use up BF's CPU/servers as much. Oh well, just my .02$
 
Hmm ... in my experience that "Search this site with Google box" usually sux even worse than internal search engines, but it might be better than nothing -- if we can do it. Have you ever seen that on a vBulletin forum? I don't think the software allows it....
 
Cougar Allen said:
Hmm ... in my experience that "Search this site with Google box" usually sux even worse than internal search engines, but it might be better than nothing -- if we can do it. Have you ever seen that on a vBulletin forum? I don't think the software allows it....
Click to expand...

You can use Google search with vBulletin but there are a lot of limitations. For instance, you can't choose which specific forum to search in. It is pretty much an all or nothing search that will display all posts the user has access to. Google search is however a little more friendly in regards to server resources.
 
If you use Firefox and have the search engine for the browser set to Google (and set to open in a new tab!), you can simply type in "search_word site:bladeforums.com"

All posts that are indexed with Google will be available via that specific search.

The caveats? Some of the forum is probably not indexed (if Spark has setup the robots.txt files to stop it), and it doesn't seem to search well on the poster's name...

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that you can customize a google search for Firefox to always append site:bladeforums.com and then you just use the quick search of Firefox to do the job. If I have time (which I highly doubt), I'll see if I can quickly find and post the instructions for adding that specialized search to firefox....

Found this article: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/09/learn-to-create-firefox-search-plugin.html

But if you're a regular user of bladeforums.com, why don't you go ahead and spring for a paid membership too?
 
As requested:

A browser plugin for Firefox that will search bladeforums for the words chosen:

This file needs to be placed in the searchplugins folder wherever Firefox is installed on your computer. For me, that meant under C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins.

Create a new file, name it bladeforums.xml, edit it with notepad and place the following in it:

Code: 
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>BladeForums.com</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search of BladeForums.com</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&amp;client=firefox&amp;qu={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <Param name="sitesearch" value="bladeforums.com"/>
  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

Restart firefox and you can now choose the Bladeforums.com search plugin.

Hope this helps some....
 
For IE users, if you've got a google search toolbar in your IE window, you can conduct a google search adding bladeforums.com in quotes and as morrowj says, it's all or nothing but it returns faster than the BladeForums.com search feature, that's for sure. If you're using IE6 you can open a new tab faster than you can actually get to the internal search page anyhow. Not as convenient if you don't know, but now that you do you can save Bladeforums some overhead bandwidth and use this method.
 
Adding a Google Search of Bladeforums.com to IE isn't as straightforward as it is for Firefox. But I searched Microsoft's documentation and I have come up with a "fix"...

This is only for Internet Explorer 7

You'll have to visit my website for it and click the (only) link provided: http://www.toddcomp.com/bfsearch.html

This is the content of that page:

Code: 
<a href="#"
   onclick="window.external.AddSearchProvider('http://www.toddcomp.com/bladeforums.xml')"
   >Add BladeForums Search</a>

This is the content of the bladeforums.xml file that adds the search provider:

Code: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>BladeForums.com Google Search</ShortName>
<Description>BladeForums.com Google Search provider</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding><Url type="text/html" template="http://www.google.com/search?q=+site%3Abladeforums.com+{searchTerms}"/></OpenSearchDescription>

Now you can search with Google...
 
I do know of one other forum that uses a Google search but I don't know if they run vBulletin or not. I usually use the *(What you want to search for)* site:www.bladeforums.com and it works ok, better than nothing.
 
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