I have noticed that sometimes when I search for certain survey related terms on Google, a few search results are the other site's threads.
Has anyone thought of a way to search the archived discussions without going to the site (such as Google advanced search)?
Why not just go over there, register, sign in, and search for what you need?
After all, they were nice enough to go through the trouble (and it apparently WAS trouble) to preserve the stuff.
They don't bite over there......unless you go into the Lounge.
You can search any specific web site using Google. For example, let's say you want to search for "awesome surveyors" on this site using Google instead of our built-in search function. In the search field at google.com, you'd enter:
awesome surveyors site:surveyorconnect.com
Keep in mind, however, that the Google search is limited to pages that are already indexed. It's best to search using the site's own search function, but if the content you are looking for has been out there for a reasonable amount of time, it should show up in Google's index.
Sometimes a site's built-in search function is lacking in ability, which makes this little trick useful in many cases.
I see what you mean. I just tried searching our company website from Google and although I got a lot of hits, when I clicked on them I get "page not found". The fact that our website was just redesigned may have something to do with that, huh?
> The fact that our website was just redesigned may have something to do with that, huh?
Well, it depends. If the URLs to the pages changed as a result of the redesign, then yes, they'll need to be re-indexed (which appears to be the case). If you are concerned about all of the non-findable content, you probably should have your designer/developer create some .htaccess rules to automatically redirect the old URLs to the new. In some cases, that's a tough task to implement, so maybe that is why you don't already have that in place.
I don't think it is important. I was just trying out the "new" tip that you gave in this thread. I keep saying that I'm gonna sit down and learn the tricks to efficient searches, but I just learn one now and then.....when someone shares one.:-)
Glad I could help! It is a really cool tip and I use it quite a bit. 🙂
Because the site is slow and annoying. I thought that much was obvious.
I use google for site-specific searches all the time. I forgot about sites needing to be indexed, and I don't suppose that the archives are. Thanks for the input. 🙂
True.......but it's somewhat better than it used to be.
The most annoying thing with those archives is that some of the best info was in longer discussions and posts. Almost all of those I've seen have been truncated after the first paragraph or so.
So If you want to find a thread that contained light chatter and other topics where the posts are short, you won't notice. But if you're looking for one of the meaty threads containing in depth professional discussion, you're likely to be very disappointed.
The few times I've been back recently, the speed seems to be much better than it was a few months ago. They have also made a recent threads page that keeps active threads easy to find and follow. There seems to be more activity than there was a few months back too.
