For those of you who follow this blog you'll be familiar that search/indexing hasn't been working on my blog for quite some time. For that I apologize. It is no fault of the Software, and I don't blame the hoster. He's done his best. So what's the issue? I don't know this site started with CKS EBE on WS08, then got moved to another host in another domain with no trust. Ouch. With STSADM backups with WSS. Service accounts have changed and so on. I don't have access to the host, so I haven't looked at how messed up the index is, but apparently he's getting access denied when attempting to connect to the index.
That aside, I wanted to show you a couple of widgets on search. Widgets are the new assembliless web parts at least in my vocabulary... (I'm not satisfied with Webopedia or Wikipedia definitions on this one) and as far as search is concerned you'll have much better luck if you search for Widget than searching for "search webparts" otherwise you get internet search web parts at best. There are far more widgets that will meet our demands and work quite nicely in the content editor web part. If your blog is on the intranet... sorry this approach won't work. These require that the content be indexed.
Now with SharePoint those of you who are designers will know that when you have a <Form> tag in your content editor web part or most web parts it will fail. The traditional site search for Google (referred to as CSE Custom Search Engine) will simply fail if you drop it in a content editor web part. Believe me, I tried using it and tweaking it. The closest I was able to get to that and get around the forms tags was with a widget on widgetbox. I started with a few different ones and found success with a couple also the highest rated. (Note other blogs may have similar restrictions and may benefit from this research.)
http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/tiny-google-search
and
http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/google-sitesearch-without-websearch
Simply specify the domain name or full path such as domain.com/blog, and a link to an image, then grab the code and put it in a content editor web page. Then as long as google is indexing you, you've now got site search.
The downside to that search is the guy that actually built this one decided to put a bunch of ads all over the page.
Side Note on Troubleshooting
Now when I was putting this widget in a content editor web part and changing the Appearance -> Chrome type to "None" I kept getting a wierd generic SharePoint error. I found this was orignally from some javascript form tags that were getting messed up. I later found that with my comments when clicking apply it was trying to submit the comments. I know this sounds really strange. The work around was to fill out the comments without hitting submit and then clicking apply. You may run into something like this some day. It's a lot simpler than the other work around of closing that web part while adding the various web parts I wanted to add to the posts.aspx page. Adding the &contents=1 to the or ?contents=1 did allow me to force the web part maintenance page and close the web parts I wanted to, and then later added them back to the page as John Ross so easily illustrates in opening a closed web part. I actually found I had 2 closed comment web parts and added both so I could delete one of them.
Isn't there something better?
Better search box widget for the home page with COOL social features
So next comes lijit.com the first time I went to ligit I felt like it was very imposing. It felt a bit like friendfeed.com the first time I went there. Here was another service that was trying to combine everything. After configuring a few of the services I went away... only to come back today and I was pleased this time. It was seeing it on Christian Buckley's blog and my troubles with search that made me try again.
So I configured the search lijit widjit (widget). In the screenshot you can see the settings.)
By default I wanted it to include just the content in the blog, but returning the results to the same page made some funky stuff happen with SharePoint, so I elected to have them displayed on their site. There are a lot of features that I turned off to make it simple and straightforward... It wasn't a bad experience. The cool stuff happens when people decide to search in "Content" or "Network" (see screenshot below) which searches across all of my social places.
That can actually include images from flickr, bookmarks from del.icio.us, youtube videos, etc... And the network one found my blogroll automatically and I can check and uncheck and even add more blogs... very cool!
And the results look great!
Now I just need to turn off WSS search. Doh!
I've noticed it gives a bunch of extra relevancy to the PPTs I have on my site.
The search you saw here today is configured on default.aspx and on post.aspx, so depending on how you landed on this page, you should see one or the other in the upper right hand corner...
Widgetbox.com Gadget Powered Search (free, but has ads that someone else is caching in on)
Ligit Search (free without or with share 1/2 revenue? hmmm)
In my experience I found the lijit wijit works great on the default.aspx page, but not on posts.aspx page, so I went with the widgetbox tiny google search or Site Search without Web Search (click get Widget) to get your copy.
Wigetbox Site Search without Web Search (I couldn't find a way to get rid of the logo) Sorry it looks like I sponsor google.
Enjoy!