HELP FOR THE BLOGSPOTTED: GOOGLE SEARCH YOUR SITE - UPDATED 5-24-05

Google bought Blogger a while back, and yet Blogger still doesn't have a native search function included in the blogging software.

Which isn't really a problem... until that day comes (and it will) when you want to find one of your old entries, but you don't remember when you posted it, and you can only remember a couple words from it. Sure, you could manually search 3 or 4 months worth of archive pages, but what a pain in the ass THAT would be.

And even if YOU don't care about your old posts, other people might. What if they want to link one of your old posts, but have no idea where to find it? What if that one link would FINALLY push you up to Flappy Bird in the Ecosystem?

You NEED a search function on your blog.

Fortunately, Google provides free cut & paste code so you can have just that. All you have to do is paste in your site URL where it says "YOUR DOMAIN NAME". Simple.

And freakin' HUGE! This thing is like 10,000 pixels wide!

Fortunately, you can tweak a few things to shrink it to fit into your sidebar. Here's what I've done at my old Blogspot site:

<!-- SiteSearch Google -->
<FORM method=GET action="http://www.google.com/search">
<TABLE bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><tr>
<td>
<INPUT TYPE=text name=q size=25 maxlength=255 value="">
<INPUT type=submit name=btnG VALUE="Google Search">
<font size=-1>
<input type=hidden name=domains value="http://badmoney.blogspot.com"><br><input type=radio name=sitesearch value=""> WWW <input type=radio name=sitesearch value="http://badmoney.blogspot.com" checked> Bad Money <br>
</font>
</td></tr></TABLE>
</FORM>
<!-- SiteSearch Google -->

Just change the bolded items to your URL in the first two spots and the name of your blog in the last one.

You can change the width of the box by changing the "size" variable to something less than 25.

There's also the bare-bones option which appears underneath, the code for which is:

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" target="_blank">
<INPUT TYPE=text name=q size=25 maxlength=255 value="">
<input class="go" type="submit" name="submit" value="Search Bad Money" />
<input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="http://badmoney.blogspot.com" />
</form>

Again, change the bolded items to your blog name and your blog URL, respectively.

Also again, you can change the width of the box by changing the "size" variable to something less than 25.

How well this works is debatable. It seems to be pretty good about picking up words in post titles. Words in the body of the entry or in comments... not so much. However, it's better than nothing.

If anybody knows how to tweak this code to make it a little more sensitive/responsive, please speak up in the comments.

UPDATE 5-23-05: William of Pirate's Cove has some additional tweaks for the code.

UPDATE 5-24-05: [If you've found this post useful enough to blog about, send a trackback or e-mail the permalink to me at harvolson-at-gmail.com and I'll add you to my Bad Example Groupies blogroll. See this post for details]