I’ve been meaning to get searching working on my site for what seems like forever, and I decided to finally get around to getting some manner of search working via the temporary “use Google” solution. Unfortunately, it seems Google no longer does boolean searches completely properly as advertised. I am sure Google Search still supports boolean logic (as opposed to the assumed “and” between each word) because the Advanced Search, linked to from their front page, still has it, and it returns a few of the results it should.
As an example:
If I wanted to search the
Projects and
Updates sections of my sites for either the keywords
fractal or
font I would use the following search:
(site:www.castledragmire.com/Projects OR site:www.castledragmire.com/Updates) AND (Fractal OR Font)
This currently only returns 3 results, when it should return 11 different results, enumerated by using the 4 separate searches (with return results):
- site:www.castledragmire.com/Projects Fractal
- site:www.castledragmire.com/Projects Font
- site:www.castledragmire.com/Updates Fractal
- site:www.castledragmire.com/Updates Font
Actual Google returned results:
A simple example of this through the
Google Advanced Search Page is as follows:
Fractal OR Font site:www.castledragmire.com/Projects [Advanced Search]
Which only returns 3 results (following) instead of the 6 (see above) that it should:
Because of this, I need to go ahead and get real searching up via MySQL (or possibly another solution), as originally planned, sooner than later, since Google will not work as a temporary solution for what I want.
I wrote up a paper on what could be done through Google Search over 5 years ago as a job request [to be posted soon], which I believe is very informative. I’m sure it’s a little outdated, but it shows how much can Google can [could] do for you.
