Two search engines help you find Windows info
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By
Brian Livingston
How many times have you said to yourself, "I know I saw an article three or four months ago, but now I'm danged if I can find it"? Our site now makes it easier for you to locate the exact trick you're looking for in more than 6,000 articles that our contributors have written in the past few years — or on the entire Web. |
Query our content or all Windows sites
1. Search within Windows Secrets, LangaList, and Brian's Buzz
We've added the ability for you to search every individual article that's ever appeared in the Windows Secrets Newsletter, the LangaList Newsletter (published by Fred Langa from 1998 to 2006), and Brian's Buzz on Windows (a newsletter I wrote in 2003 and 2004).
The Windows Secrets Newsletter was formed in 2004 by merging Brian's Buzz with Woody's Windows Watch, a newsletter published by our contributing editor Woody Leonhard from 1998 to 2004. LangaList merged with Windows Secrets in 2006. (We've managed so far to catalog Fred's articles going back to 2001. We plan to add Woody's back issues to our search index in the weeks to come.)
Free subscribers: You can now see a summary of all our articles, even the paid ones, on every page of our search results. The summary might be all you need to jog your memory! If you'd like to read the full text of any paid article, however, there's no big fee. We accept any financial contribution of any amount — and you get a full 12 months of paid content to boot! How to upgrade
Figure 1. The "Windows Secrets" tab searches our own content, whereas the "All Windows-related sites" tab queries Google's index of tech sites.
To search within all Windows secrets articles, click the Search tab in our top-level menu, or surf to our search page. To add LangaList and Brian's Buzz articles to your query, simply turn on the check boxes for these titles in Advanced Options (as shown in Figure 1).
2. Search within ALL sites related to Windows
What if you can't find the specific Windows tip you need, even after you've gone back through several years of Windows Secrets content?
We've developed a second, specialized search engine that queries all of the top Windows-related sites. This feature uses code we've created based on the API (application programming interface) of Google.com.
Why wouldn't you just use Google.com itself to search the Web? Our front-end makes Google crawl through only those Web sites that focus exclusively on Microsoft Windows. Instead of seeing row after row of sites that sell Windows, you'll get results from sites that have great information about Windows.
Google itself decides which Web sites are "Windows-related." That means it ain't just our friends who appear in the search results — thousands of sites are searched. If your favorite geek site doesn't show up, we aren't the ones who excluded it. You'll have to complain to the billionaires at the Googleplex.
I think you'll find, though, that Google does a very good job of determining which sites have worthwhile info. Using our "Windows-related sites" search, you'll never again get information about stained-glass windows when you're looking for technical help.
To query all Windows-related Web sites, visit our site search page.
Golly, gee — it's trickier than it looks
It might seem easy to craft a search engine, but it turns out to be one of the hardest development jobs to get right. Imagine a program that accepts one or two words of input and gives you back only the results you wanted.
My old WinFind 1.0 service was launched back in 2003. Major enhancements were released as WinFind 2.0 in 2004. This week's new search engines represent WinFind 3.0, although that's like saying a Porsche is just an upgraded Model T. (I announced WinFind in InfoWorld magazine on Feb. 6, 2003. WinFind 2.0 was unveiled in the Windows Secrets Newsletter on July 8, 2004.)
Prior to today, our search page was powered by technology from Atomz.com. (Atomz was acquired by Web Side Story in 2005, which changed its name to Visual Sciences and was recently acquired in turn by Omniture.) By contrast, our two new search engines are entirely based on our own code, plus the Google API.
Credit for the development effort should go to Windows Secrets research director Vickie Stevens and program director Brent Scheffler. An earlier launch of theirs brought you our new Library feature — an improved way to browse our articles, as I described in a Mar. 20 article.
Like any .0 version, our two new search engines may still have some quirks. Please run a few queries. If you find any results that look odd, let me know using our contact page, and we'll soon bring out a .01 version.
Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com and the co-author of Windows Vista Secrets and 10 other books.
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