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Adding Google Search to your TypePad weblog
Matt Haughey of PVRblog writes in a great tip about adding a Google search to your TypePad weblog. Once you add the search to your weblog, your readers will be able to search your site for specific keywords.
How to add Google Search to your TypePad site
1. Create a new Typelist, one for links, I called mine "Google search"
2. Create a new item, with no title and no URL. In the note section add the following code:
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
<input type="text" name="q" size="5" maxlength="255" style="width:95px;" />
<input type="submit" name="btnG" value="»" style="width:25px" />
<input type="hidden" name="domains" value="pvr.blogs.com" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="pvr.blogs.com" />
</form>
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
3. Then, change the domains and sitesearch hidden form values to your Typepad URL.
4. Next click the "Configure" tab on your search Typelist and under advanced configuration, change the Display Notes option to "As text".
5. Save Changes, add the list to your blog, and you'll end up with your own search box that will show visitors everything google knows about your blog.
Advanced users: you can add a style tag to the Form element, and modify the margins in css to get a layout you want (e.g. style="margin-top:4px; margin-bottom:20px;") and also play with the widths of the textbox and button (the supplied size worked on my typepad layout but other layouts could require larger or smaller widths).
To see it in action, check out Matt's sidebar.
Thanks Matt!
Applies to: All Levels
Posted by Mena on August 29, 2003 in Tips and Tricks | Permalink
Questions
The only problem that I can see with that is the frequency at which Google spiders your site. A quick search of Google for my own domain name revealed that indexed posts were sufficiently out of date to not really be useful.
Posted by: snowman at August 29, 2003 06:12 PM
How do you find the "domains and sitesearch hidden form"; step 3?
Can you use it to place meta tags that block spider searches?
Posted by: David Collin at August 29, 2003 09:10 PM
Another option for adding search is Picosearch (http://www.picosearch.com), which I'm using here: http://introverting.typepad.com
It gives you the added benefit of being able to view search statistics and choose when to re-index your site for search. And, it's free.
Posted by: Brian at August 29, 2003 10:36 PM
David, the "domains and sitesearch hidden forms" are the parameters shown above. They're hidden from view when saved, but store the domain of your blog for google to search. So in the above code, here's the code you need to change:
input type="hidden" name="domains" value="your-blog-title.typepad-or-blogs.com"
replace the your-blog-title and the proper domain, then do it again for the other bit of code.
Posted by: Matt Haughey at August 30, 2003 12:11 AM
This seems to only search the entries -- can it be tweaked to search comments as well?
Posted by: Vidiot at August 31, 2003 04:31 PM
I used the google site search on my pre-typepad blog and, to my surprise, found it lacking. They don't spider blogs very well. The next step was to try Atomz. It was a bit painful to set up, but it works very well. You can tell it when to spider and they email you a weekly summary of queries.
The downside is that the free version is limited to 500 pages, which is an issue for very heavy blogging.
There are probably other alternatives.
I haven't gotten around to installing it on my typepad site. I have been hoping that they will make a search tool available (at one point they indicated that this might happen).
Posted by: steve at September 1, 2003 04:14 AM
I tried picosearch ... it looks good for low volume blogging. Unfortunately I would blow through the "free" version in about 10 months and the plan that would double the number of pages (note that a page is every entry) would cost $249 a year.
Posted by: steve at September 1, 2003 04:30 AM
I had a couple of quirks come up when I incorporated the google search into my site: When I searched for an author for which I'd written two book reviews, 1) a ton of results came up because one of the reviews appears in a type list on the home page, and 2) the second review did not show up at all -- it seems that none of the posts imported from my pre-typepad blog are found using the search.
Anyone know if it's possible to include a Moveable Type sort of search that neatly returns a list of posts that include the search criteria?
Posted by: bayona at September 1, 2003 12:48 PM
Give http://www.freefind.com a try.
Posted by: Rod at September 1, 2003 10:02 PM
After installing the google box I only get one link for any search word I use. Any ideas how to set up the box so all posts are shown that contain a certain search word?
Posted by: David at September 7, 2003 04:31 AM
Works like a charm, thanks Matt.. I added a post on the blog too about this page, and config information. There is that delay in Google crawling the content, but I figure it will improve over time, as the blogs grow, and the content becomes more like "news" content for them....
Posted by: drweb at September 7, 2003 10:29 PM
I've tried adding this Google Search function to my test blog two or three times and I'm pretty sue it isn't working.
My test blog is karraker.typepad.com/test
When I enter this in the values and save, etc. I get the following return from Google:
Your search - Blair - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "site:karraker.typepad.com/test/ ".
Yes, I realize there's a lag time for the Google bot to index the pages, but just how long might that be? I've tried this and waited 2-3 days, on occasion, with the same negative results. I'm wondering if somehow I've got the code itself wrong.
What am I missing here?
Posted by: Roger Karraker at September 15, 2003 02:01 PM
Is there any way to create a search for ALL TypePad blog content? Is this even possible?
Sometimes I want to find a post I remember reading on someone's blog, but I can't remember what blog it was. I've tried going to Google and adding "TypePad" to the keywords I'm searching for, but that doesn't work. I was thinking if you could search within one blog, why not within every typepad.com blog.
Posted by: carried away at September 16, 2003 08:46 AM
You theoretically can use "site:typepad.com", which will pick up any blog that Google is able to find with a typepad.com URL.
This will also miss my domain-mapped crystalflame.net monsoon.typepad.com site.
Try using "Powered by TypePad".
There's also
<meta name="generator" content="http://www.typepad.com/" />
in all TypePad pages.
Posted by: Richard Soderberg at October 2, 2003 06:55 PM
I'm new at this, too. I had the problem that
Roger reported, above. When I try a Google
search, it just says my page wasn't found.
(I typed "typepad.com" in the domains and
sitesearch spaces.)
And, by the way, is there a way, in TypePad,
to put a right margin in these text boxes,
so we wouldn't have to hit a RETURN every
time, to see what we have written before we
preview or save it?
The text seems to string out to the right for
miles! :)
Frank Warner
Posted by: Frank Warner at October 11, 2003 12:57 AM
The Google search did nothing but putting the HTML code from ATOMZ in exactly the same place as the Google recommendation and doing everything else the same produced a perfect result. I can now index manually when ever I post or I can let ATOMZ index on schedule once a week.
Posted by: hamilt at November 14, 2003 09:30 PM
The Google search window was added as promised, but there are two problems I need help with:
1)when a google search is executed from my blog site, google seems to be searching for the entered text from my blog! You must click on the "Search WWW" option and click "search" AGAIN to get the search to work like a normal google search. Is there a way to eliminate this extra step?
2)which "width" value specifically must be changed to increase the size of the search text window?
Anyone know how to fix these? Thanks!
Posted by: Chris Monroe at January 1, 2004 08:04 PM
I like to add my domain name in search engine as like yahoo, google etc. Any one please advice me, how to add my domain name in search engine without paying high price!
Posted by: sunny at January 9, 2004 10:08 AM
Well, isn't that bit of porn spam attractive!
Now to my question and I hope Matt is still around to answer or perhaps others know the answer:
In the code Matt has above there's "btnG" which appears to describe an oval button which says ">" on it and is 25 pixels wide. I modified the last two values, so mine could say "go", which looks fine at 40 pixels.
But what is "btnG", where is it coming from and what other buttons are available? More specifically, I like those search buttons that have the multi-colored "Google" in them. How does one get those?
Posted by: Roger Karraker at January 22, 2004 01:32 PM
