Using Google's Blogsearch

I’m using hobix to power my blog. Unfortunately it requires some work to get the dynamic components up and running (search and comments).

So I decided to use Google’s Blogsearch which is pretty powerful.

To include a search box on your own site paste the following code into your HTML template and set the bl_url field to your own domain:

 <form method="get" action="http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch">
   <input name="as_q" size="15" maxlength="255" value="" type="text">
   <input name="sa" value="Google Search" type="submit">
   <input name="bl_url" value="blog.interlinked.org" type="hidden">
   <input name="ie" value="ISO-8859-15" type="hidden">
   <input name="oe" value="ISO-8859-15" type="hidden">
 </form>

The Blogsearch supports all standard operators from Google’s search, but also some blog-specific ones:

• inblogtitle: search only within the title of the blog
• inposttitle: search only within the title of the posting
• inpostauthor: search only within the author field
• blogurl: return only results starting with the given URL (that’s exactly what we use for our search-box)

The biggest advantage over Google’s Web-search is, that the Blogsearch almost instantly crawls your blog after you’ve pinged them, or a service monitored by Google.

I use two pinging-services:

• http://pingomatic.com/
• http://pingoat.com/index.php

Only a few seconds after the ping, my feed gets fetched from Google and my article is available via the Blogsearch.