Another Flex search engine — and you can put it on your personalized Google home page
Comments(11) Ted Patrick recently created the Flex Search Engine. I’ve created another one, based on Google’s capability of creating your own custom search engines.
The official Flex Search Engine is supposed to eventually rank results based on star ratings given to various results by the user community. But the problem I had is that for now, since it’s still in alpha and doesn’t yet provide star ratings, the ranking of results isn’t very good.
So I created another one, based on Google’s “Custom Search Engine” feature. You can see it in the right-hand column of this blog: Just below the regular WordPress search box (which only searches my blog) is another search box, which searches Google, but only on sites related to Flex.
And one great thing about Google customized search engines is that you can add them to your personalized Google home page. Just click the “Add to Google” link to the right.
It currently searches the Flex 2 parts of adobe.com and all the MXNA and fullasagoog Flex-related blogs. (Anything else I should add?) Unfortunately, it does not search the flexcoders and flexcomponents lists which are hosted on Yahoo groups. Actually, I did add them to the list of locations to search, but it is not finding results from those sites. Why? Well, because Ted explained to me that, probably due to turf wars, Yahoo apparently doesn’t allow Google to return search results from Yahoo groups. Ugh. [Update: In the comments, James Ward pointed me to a mirror of the flexcoders and flexcomponents lists, so I've added those mirrors to the search, and that did the trick. Thanks James!]
In any case, the ranking of results is excellent, thanks to my clever system that I call PageRank (umm, okay I guess I can’t take credit for that):
- A search for “button” returns the livedocs page for mx.controls.Button as the first hit. (And also some very useful advertisements for buttons, pins, and badges.)
- A search for “modules” returns a blog entry from Roger Gonzalez, the modules guru, as the first hit.
- A search for “item renderers” returns a quickstart article about item renderers as the first hit, and the livedocs documentation page as the second hit.
Cool stuff Mike. I think you should be able to add the flexcoders archive from:
http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com/
Hopefully that works.
-James
Perfect, James — thank you! I’ve now added flexcoders and flexcomponents to the search.
The CSE’s work pretty well. They will only show results of pages indexed by google normally though. Another thing you can do is create refinements. Think of a refinement as a category. You can then apply those refinements to each of the sites you add to your CSE so people can filter the results. For example have a refine ment list as corporate, blog, Open Source, Community Site, etc.
I ended up doing that for my coldfusion CSE and it worked pretty well ( I think ). You can also have people volunteer to help maintain. I found that while I had several volunteer, they never logged in again. And half of them never left their name or any identifying information. Further you can’t see what sites they are adding, so it is kind of risky.
http://www.cfhunt.com is the CF CSE I built in case your interested.
[...] Personalized Google Homepage Flex Search Widget from Mike Morearty’s blog post [...]
Flash websites require HTML optimization so they can be identified by search engines such as Google on the Internet.
Q. As part of a Rich Internet Application, does Flex 2 optimise Flash-generated content, so the website(s) can be identified by search engines? If not, is there any RIA software that can be used with Flex 2 to optimize Flash content?
can anyone help me with an answer to this
Hi Niall,
I personally don’t know a lot about that subject, but it was discussed recently on the flexcoders list: start here, and then be sure to read all the replies (click the links at the bottom of the page, and the read articles that are linked to from there). If you have more questions, the flexcoders list has a lot of people who can probably help.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the link to flex.org. I’ve been wanting to build a more responsive search engine and the components should work fine.
Just thought i’d drop a comment to let you know that i really like the custom search and how you used it. It’s quite suprising we havent seen more usage of the google custom search in more advanced ways. anyways from one flex user to another thanks
Mike, thanks for sharing the information on ‘flex’. I too am having a crack at building a more interactive search engine, and your post has certainly pointed me in the right direction.
Many thanks once again.
Does anyone know how to make my simple flex 2 site searchable by Google. Is this possible??
Thanks,
Daniel
Daniel brings up a good point. Will the flex 2 site be searchable by Google? If yes then will the results be ignored due to duplicate content issues?
Robert Hernreich