Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Does anybody know what happened to Google's site search function?

I used that thing all the time!

As I've pointed out before, the blog search function in the top left corner of blogspot blogs doesn't work very well, so I've always advised readers to use the much more thorough site search function on Google (see this post for an explanation). That allows you to comprehensively search the contents of a single website, and gave you many more responses than Google's blog search function (Google also owns and operates Blogger, which hosts blogspot blogs like Grits).

As of yesterday, for the first time, that tool just brings up five or so entries from Grits, even on topics where I know I've written many dozens of items. (See the result for "prison," which should result in hundreds of posts.) How frustrating! Same on other sites. One of the main reasons I blog is to put material online that I can access later myself in a searchable format. Does anybody know a workaround for using this Google function, or alternatively, any other web tool to comprehensively search a specific site? Maybe some setting was changed? If you know anything about this, please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE:
Okay, things seem to be working normally again. This was huge hassle for me and especially my assistant who's been trying to use the function to do some research for me at work. I hope whatever Google was doing with their system doesn't happen very often.

2 comments:

Gritsforbreakfast said...

Dewapo: It only gave me 4 of 64 on pretrial - I don't know what's going on, but others around me have reported the same complaint so I don't think it's my computer, settings, etc..

Silona said...

don't know and will ask around when I visit them next month...

there is also technorati.com

I have more pull there :-)