new! improved!
When I saw Jeff Jarvis mention Nick Denton’s cool new Google site search feature, it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do that too. The custom search program I wrote is getting dog-slow as the entries accumulate, since it’s just a brute-force search-every-file algorithm. And rather than try to reinvent the wheel and write my own indexing and caching system, with all the attendant bandwidth and storage issues, why not take advantage of the world’s fastest? Everyone say, “Thank you, Google. We worship you.”
Adding the code to call Google also reminded me to update my robot meta tags, which were out of date. And we all know how painful that can be. For example, Google was indexing the results pages from the old search script, in an odd self-referential hypersearch kind of way.