Updated: 24/9/05; 10:44:20
 Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Dave Winer's got a nice example of using Google's API to generate an enhanced weblog search. It works well for www.scripting.com. Knowing Dave this new feature will be available to all Userland webloggers soon and that will be very welcome.

However, I have a question about how this will work with weblogs without a top-level domain name. I'm guessing but I reckon Dave's using Google's site search feature to narrow search results to a particular weblog. For example:

"david davies site:scriptingnews.userland.com"

narrows Google's search result to only those hits on scriptingnews.userland.com. This is a neat feature in Google.

Unfortunately there's a gotcha. Site search doesn't work with weblogs (or any other Internet site) that don't have a top level domain. For example:

"dave winer site:radio.weblogs.com/0001161/"

site:radio.weblogs.com/0001161/ is not valid, only site:radio.weblogs.com is but that's no use as there are thousands of weblogs on that server.

Hmm, maybe the only solution is for webloggers to get themselves a top-level domain name? Or could Google be persuaded to extend their site search feature to URL fragments rather than just the domain name?

Posted 11:08:54 PM - comment []