Google Custom Search Engine
I’ve added the Search page to the site and utilised the Google Custom Search Engine. This is quite a handy piece of kit, basically you use Google’s background mechanisms and specify which sites you want the engine to search through for data. So in this instance I’ve set the search engine to find pages here at Fog of Eternity and on certain other sites that I develop and/or host. It makes finding specific information on the site very easy.
That being said, the tool is not without some flaws. There are two issues which are less than perfect for me.
The Google Custom Search Engine uses Google’s own systems, which means that the results that come back are the same as if you were looking at the same result found through the main Google search engine, just limited to specific sites. This is not a major issue, but it does mean that the results of the search will not always take into account recent updates to site content because the Google web spiders have not yet re-examined the site and logged that new content. For example, if I were to remove all references to “Camarilla” on the site, the search engine would still come back with results for a search using the word “Camarilla”, because it’s using Google’s records rather than examining the live site. Those results would remain until Google’s web spiders had updated their own records. That being said, Google has various spiders continually trawling web content, and so the new content would be incorporated into their search results within a few days.
The second issue is the general inflexibility of the Google Custom Search Engine in terms of coding and appearance. This site is coded in ASP .NET and uses a master page for most of the look and feel - i.e. the most regularly updated content is “plugged in” to the overall design of the page - the banner, right column, etc. These master pages use a FORM tag, which surrounds the content of the page, and the Google Custom Search Engine also uses a FORM tag in its code. The problem here? You can’t put one FORM tag inside another, and given that all the design for Fog of Eternity is within a FORM tag already when it’s using the master template page, the engine won’t work.
Result of that is that the Search page is coded as a standalone page, rather than using the master template. All of the content is included, it simply means that to make a universal change to the overall look and feel of the site I’d have to change the master template, which would update all the other pages, AND the Search page specifically. There’s actually a similar limitation on this blog, and so the blog page is also a standalone page coded to look exactly the same as the template.
The inflexibility of the Google Custom Search Engine also impacts on an aesthetic level. Basically you can’t play with the Custom Search Engine in terms of styling, at least beyond setting font colours for text/hyperlinks etc. And you have to put up with some Google advertising - which is fair enough given that they are otherwise providing the tool free of charge. There are some alternative, and relatively complex, options for an alternative Google Custom Search Engine that may allow for more styling, and I’ll be looking into those in the future.
Taking all that into account though, the search engine is still a useful bit of kit to have on the site, to provide a wider functionality.
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