Now who the bleep is generating my titles? Oh (spotting a mirror). This was a bit of sideways fun, but come to appreciate a bit of likely Google actually goodness woven into my blog. Hang on, there’s a story.
After the last post (I know you all read it!) on the good old MOOOOOOOOC machine I was looking through my hard drive back archive of my sites to update the changes I had made right on the server (yeah I hear the tsking, sue me, its my site). I could not find it, but instead came across an image file that I had totally not remembered making, and was worth adding to my post because it is a better visual explanation than my own words.
But where did it come from? So that comes into play as I have in addition to standard WordPress search a rather useful, tool- my Found Bones and Lost Blog Toys – I have my search template set up to send a user there too. Maybe we start there and enter “Mooc Machine” landing one to the WordPress results. Just below the header you find a link to my second search tool — Try the advanced search via the big dog tools — even sending the search words along for the ride.
I cant even remember how long I had set of a Google Programmable Search Engine (wait, Ibet I have a blog post), and pretty sure it was Scott Leslie who tipped me off about this. “Programmable” seems a misnomer, I think before it was called Google Custom Search. The idea was it used google’s search but only over a specified set of URLs. Heck, its almost like what RAG does in a way.
So yes, I have one set up, and can see it searches my main blog and a few more subdomains:
While I am here, I had a few more of my domains cog.dog and cogdog.casa
This means I can use alo of the google search modifiers like “-” to exclude etc to search my own sites.
But back to the story! On running my custom google search on “mooc machine” I get results that of course match my blog posts (and notice my template provides the return search route back to WordPress)
I had used this for years without even paying attention to that “Image” button under the search field. Boom! I can seach across my domain for images. I can see the image I found rummaging around my computer was used somewhere on my site.
And if I click the image, it reveals and links to the post that it was used in! Then I went down a memory hole reading this post about the Daily Create which was one I missed using for our Reclaim Open session, but heck, why not comblogulate it?
I digress.
So everyone can bemoan how broken Google Search is and wail to the skies, but if you only use the front door to the enterprise, you are not getting full advantage. I likely am wrong but am not sure I can rig easily anything like my Google Custom Search with some other bing, kagi, brave, duck duck go…
My weird little tool that almost no one knows about, it works weally well.
Just to go how badly I know my own blog, I guess this is all not new to me!
Featured Image: Pixnio photo by Bicanski shared into the public domain using CC0.
