Zugg Software :: View topic

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Worth a look Zugg?

News site
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6079824.stm
http://theinq.com/default.aspx?article=35301

Google's Site
http://www.google.com/coop/
http://www.google.com/coop/docs/cse/collaboration.html

And here's one I made earlier (for CMUD)
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010649801461192202575%3Aiklgqur9pw8

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:54 pm

Hmm, that's actually very interesting! I played with it a bit and it's certainly better than our own full-text search of the forums and knowledge base. I'll try to find some time to look more into it (in my copious free time :). But it definitely looks worth doing.

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:29 pm

It sounds like something that's right up one of the gurus alley. I'm 'sure' they have 'copious amounts of free time' too, and quite likely more than yours.

I say Guru but really anyone who has moderator access and is well versed with the site. (I'd volunteer but I fail both criteria Very Happy

)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:26 pm

I was reading about this today in various news threads, in particular a mention about macworld.net having implemented it as most of the people in charge there were resorting to using google with site:macworld.net plus their search term instead of their own sites search box. If only our free time was copious.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

Believe it or not most of the Gurus have 'copious' amounts of free time. Right now Taz is the most active poster; I continue to lurk, as probably 1 or 2 others do. If I can manage 45 minutes a day to reading the forums between morning and night that is about all I have to spare. Formulating this reply just took another 5 minutes, meaning I don't read 2 or 3 other topics to see if they need the attention of my expertise...I just skim the title and who has replied so far There have actually been a lot of topics sliding by lately that could have used the concerted attention of some of us script Gurus, but we all have personal lives. It actually depresses me to not be able to provide as much support as I used to.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 873 Location: USA

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:48 am

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 2:13 pm

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:07 pm

I've updated the search box at the top of the web site to use the Google site search stuff. Let me know how you like it. Hopefully it will return better result order than the site search that I had before.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

found one odd result.
an old post of mine I often refer back to because I always forget the answer

Search for 'lookbehind' and it returns one result mentioning ...construct is "a zero-width negative lookbehind assertion" with makes it so that...

but then if you search for 'negative lookbehind' it returns no results

Other than that though, looks pretty good, glad the suggestion was worth making :)

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 9:15 pm

Weird...well, since it just calls the Google Site Search, I guess it's some quirk in their search engine. Either that or else it hasn't finished fully indexing the site yet.

I'm hoping that's also the reason why some of the Google Ads are a bit non-relevant to the page they are on. They say it can take 48 hours for a full site crawl, so I'll check in a few days to see if it has improved.

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 9:21 pm

Oh, and I should also mention that you can still search the KB or Forums using the Site menu along the top, and then select the appropriate Search action from the menu. That gets you back to our own search engine.

For example, I notice that when searching the Site box for "#ACTION" I get a lot of weird hits because Google strips the # character. But using the Site/Search/KnowledgeBase menu, I get the exact help page that I was looking for. I can also choose the zMUD Manual or CMUD manual from the Category drop-down to ensure that I get the proper knowledge base section.

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 1:51 pm

Google search is returning some very weird results. I did a search for "atcp" and got these four results:

Zugg Software :: Search
I've started this thread as a continuation to the ATCP discussion from the ... Just to finish the side-track on ATCP: I contacted the owner of IronRealms ...
www.zuggsoft.com/phpbb/search.php?search_author=Zugg

Zugg Software :: Forum
ATCP support in CMUD CMUD General Discussion. Sat Jun 09, 2007 1:07 am Larkin View latest post. Random Coloring zMUD General Discussion ...
www.zuggsoft.com/index.php?page=2&lmsg_start=0

Zugg Software :: Forum
ATCP support in CMUD CMUD General Discussion. Sat Jun 09, 2007 4:06 am Vijilante View latest post. Search on this website CMUD General Discussion ...
https://www.zuggsoft.com/index.php?page=2

Zugg Software :: Forum
ATCP support in CMUD CMUD General Discussion. Sat Jun 02, 2007 7:57 pm Fang Xianfu View latest post. Gag Command zMUD General Discussion ...
www.zuggsoft.com/index.php?page=2&lmsg_start=30

None of which is in any way useful.

Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 4:57 pm

Hmm, I agree. I get different results today. The results that all have the "page=2" in the URL seem to be hits on the main forum page where ATCP showed up on the left side as "recent topics". Since that panel is dynamic, a link to that page is pretty useless. I don't know why it's not drilling down into the actual posts instead.

I'm very surprised at how messed up the Google search really is. At least the first thread that you got in your search was mildly useful. Today's search doesn't have that page, and the top hit (while it has ATCP in the body) isn't very useful. Where are all of the links to the main ATCP thread?

If this continues to be this bad, I'm going to have to dump the Google search. But I must be doing something wrong because I just can't imagine that it can be this messed up.

Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 5:18 pm

OK, I might have found the problem. We have multiple domain names assigned to this site. All of the forum and knowledge base posts point to the forums.zuggsoft.com domain. This used to be a separate machine, back when we have the main site on a Windows box and the forums on a Linux box. But when the site got merged onto the linux box, we kept the domain separation.

The site search that I had set up was only searching the www.zuggsoft.com domain, and *not* the forums.zuggsoft.com domain. Google considers these two domains to be different. With the AdSense Site search, there is no way to tell it to search multiple domains. You can do this in the Google Coop search, but then the Adsense code doesn't seem to work properly to get paid for ad clicks.

Until Google can properly improve their SiteSearch for Adsense, I have changed the Site search box to search the forums.zuggsoft.com domain. This seems to be working better now. Searching for ATCP now gives good results.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 5:21 pm

Although can someone give me a quick pointer on how to exclude a PHP script from the Google search crawling? It's including a bunch of results from the "search.php" script, which makes the results a mess. I know how to exclude a subdirectory, but not sure how to prevent crawling of a particular PHP file.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40360

Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 6:32 pm

Thanks for the links. For some reason I thought the robots.txt file could only block entire directories. I didn't realize it could block specific files. I've added the search.php to the disallow list, so we'll see if that works eventually.

Novice Joined: 18 Mar 2007 Posts: 39

the google search is horrendous the old search feature was much better and far better for the forum searching imho.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

I think the google search engine works poorly with forums as well.

Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 6:40 pm

You can still access the forum search via the Site/Search menu at the top of the page. I actually find that the new search works much better for the stuff that I search for, so maybe it depends upon the search terms.