Sunday, September 13, 2009

Blogger's searching capabilities, or lack thereof

For all you Blogger users out there, or anyone who just happens to know a lot about it - what the heck has happened to Blogger's searching capabilities??? It used to be that I could search something, and I'm pretty sure that anything with those words in the title was listed first in the results, followed by anything that just used those words in the body of the post. Now... well, now I don't know what I'm getting.

For instance, I just tried a search for Ghost in the Shell, and I got one post. One. By the way, if I try that same search in the Edit Posts screen when I'm working posts, I get 8 (not counting this post). Why didn't those 8 other posts show up? I noticed the same thing when I tried to look for a particular post about James Patterson on Book Chase. At the time, I figured that Sam Sattler, the author of that blog, had just chosen to delete that post, but now I'm not so sure. I don't know when this change happened, but I'm not happy with it. It makes that little search box at the top of my blog useless. Maybe worse than useless, because there's no indication that it's skipping posts that actually exist.

Update:

Just did a search on Blogger's Known Issues blog (which could really use something like a comments feature, since Help Group doesn't seem to allow people to post new problems). This has been a known issue off and on since September 2006. Ye gods. You'd think they'd have it fixed by now. I know my search box used to work just fine, so I wonder what messed it up. The Known Issues blog includes a workaround, but it's annoying.

1 comment:

  1. I've had that problem, too. There've been some quirky new problems popping up in the past year, like spacing issues, that just drive me batty. Blogger definitely could stand to be more open to feedback or to add a forum so we can at least help each other fix minor problems.

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