Make your Blog Googable!
Friday, March 25th, 2005You know, after even just a few posts it can get a it tedious to find information that has been posted in your blog in the past. One way around this is to add a google search to your blog. That saves you the time and effort of having to create your own search utility.
To do this, you need a few things:
- Get the original code from Google: http://news.google.com/searchcode.html
- Make sure you site is indexed by Google, otherwise it won’t return any results: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Now that you have that, you’ll need to customize the search code a bit. Lets start with the base code (I’ll use the safe search code):
<!-- Google SafeSearch --><center> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"> <input name="ie" value="UTF-8" type="hidden"> <input name="oe" value="UTF-8" type="hidden"> <input name="safe" value="strict" type="hidden"> <table bgcolor="#ffffff"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <a href="http://www.google.com/search?safe=vss"> <img src="http://www.google.com/logos/Google_Safe.gif" alt="Google" align="middle" border="0" height="45" width="115" /> </a> <input name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value="" type="text"> <input name="sa" value="Google Search" type="submit"> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </form></center><!-- Google SafeSearch -->
For my purposes I got rid of some ‘unnecessary’ things like the Google logo and reduced the button text to ‘->’. The main reason for this is saving space. I also added another form field that instructs google to search my blog site only:
<!-- Google SafeSearch --><center> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"> <input name="ie" value="UTF-8" type="hidden"> <input name="oe" value="UTF-8" type="hidden"> <input name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value="" type="text"> <input name="safe" value="strict" type="hidden"> <input name="sitesearch" value="eureka.emmgee.com" type="hidden"> <input name="sa" value="->" type="submit"> </form></center><!-- Google SafeSearch -->
Google away, mateys!
