I just wasn't happy with the search system I added the other night. Atomz is great if you want to pay -- but I don't. I'd rather have a few text-ads slapped up on the search results page, and have the query take my visitors straight to what they were looking for, rather than dump them on a huge archive page with multiple entries and say "weed it out yourself from here". So I kept looking... And tonight I added in a FreeFind search box over there in the left menu-bar under the calendar. So far, so good! It seems to have all I was looking for -- heads up to new MT users looking for something similar.
Atomz is great if you have a relatively small blog, but for people like me that have a tendancy to never shut up, you're left in the dark with their free version. They stop indexing your site at 500 pages -- and won't add any others from that point on. My blog and archives aren't 500 pages total...but...the individual entry archives added up to about 540 pages to index after the Blogger and Greymatter entries were imported. So of course Atomz stopped at 500 -- and the remaining 40 entries (and anything from that point on) would never be indexed unless I wanted to upgrade my Atomz account and pay for it. I keep hoping the MT upgrade with a search feature will come out soon and make that need to pay obsolete.
Unlike Atomz, Freefind doesn't have a limit on the number of pages it will index. You can customize your search-results page by submitting your own HTML template (although they will put small ads just before the results list). With Freefind you can get reports on when your site was searched, and what terms were searched for -- including the top 50 keywords. You can customize your search box (the one I'm using over there is exactly how I had it appear with Greymatter). It will make a sitemap of your site if you want one (I didn't). You can schedule indexing, break your site into independently searchable sections, add additional URLs, and prevent certain sections of your site from being spidered. Definitely something to check out if you miss your Greymatter search functions, and Atomz is too limited for the size of your site!
Oh, thanks bunches for the info - I was wondering what I was gonna do for a search engine - and this sounds like a better solution than Atomz, which was what I was looking at before. Thanks!!! :)
¤ ¤ posted by kristine on November 12, 2001 at 10:36 AM ¤ ¤
Aha, I've been looking for one that would index more than 500 pages for free, thanks girl.
¤ ¤ posted by Candi on November 13, 2001 at 04:47 PM ¤ ¤
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