Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month's readers' queries.
Q Lots of sites seem to have a ‘site search’ function these days, and I’d like to put one on our site. How hard is it to do this?
Actually it’s very easy. There are a lot of organisations out there who offer this service. It works like this. They will spider your site (that is to say visit it and copy the data on all your pages and create a mini index on their own site) and then provide you with a short piece of HTML code to paste on to your site. When someone then runs a search, the utility checks its index of your site and returns hits as appropriate. The free utilities make their money by placing advertising at the top of the screen in the hope that a searcher will click on the link and make them some money.
If you don’t like this idea there are other utilities that will offer the same service without advertising because of course they make their money from your purchase of or subscription to the product. It usually takes no more than five minutes to set one of these things up, and doesn’t require very much technical ability beyond cut and paste. If you want to find some, a search for ‘free site search’ provides a lot of resources for you to pick and choose from.
You may also find that it’s worth going to some of the search engines, since they will also offer the same service free of charge.
Q Do you know what has happened to Jux2? It was a really useful site that compared the results from different search engines and demonstrated the overlap (or otherwise) between them. I’ve not been able to get into it for some time now.
A Unfortunately Jux2 has died – it was only ever a project and it got too big too quickly for the creators to handle it. However, all is not lost, since there are a number of other resources that do exactly the same thing. You might want to try the following: Dogpile’s Missing Pieces (http://missingpieces.dogpile.com/), Thumbshots Ranking (my favourite) (http://ranking.thumbshots.com/) or TurboScout (www.turboscout.com/) (which works slightly differently, but is still useful).
Q What’s a ‘wiki’? I’m now familiar with the concept of weblogs, but I’m seeing this term more often these days and am wondering if I’m missing out on something.
A‘Wiki’ is short for ‘What I know Is’. Essentially it’s a website where individuals are able to write about a particular subject and make that information available for everyone else to read. Very often it will be possible for others to alter the text, amend or add to it.
Probably the best example of a wiki is the Wikipedia, and you might find the link to a definition of a wiki on its site useful; you can find it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
Site of the month
My site of the month is an interesting new thing called ‘Conversate’ (www.conversate.org/). It’s a utility that allows you to create conversations with anyone that you choose – friends, colleagues and so on – by sending them a webpage that you wish to discuss with them. They can then respond, and a discussion arises. It’s really useful if you want to make people aware of a particular page and discuss either it, or the concepts contained within it.
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. New: 3rd edn of The Advanced Internet Searcher’s Handbook is now available! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header ‘column query’.
Updated: 13 July 2005