Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Searching for Cartoons

When doing the recent redesign of the site I was thinking to myself that it would be nice to have the cartoons searchable.

The following day I received a call for my brother who said "Your cartoons should really be searchable, I saw a really funny one the other day and now I can't find it..."

So it had to be done. But how?
The complication here is that I want to set the search to only search the cartoons, not the other blogs on the site. I can deal with them seperately some other time, but I think it's essential to be able to search the cartoons without other clutter.

I considered Google search, but I couldn't find a way to do it in Google's Adsense for Search... Jon Hanna on the Open List pointed out there is a way to search a particular directory in Google using 'inurl' however it's not available in adsense and I don't see a way to implement it on the site. (if anyone knows a way, drop me a line!)

So Patrick O'Beirne (also on Open) suggested Atomz, they have a free version available for sites less than 750 pages in size. So it'll do us for a while. I have implented it on the cartoon pages and it seems to be working quite nicely. I still have to tweak it a bit. Sometimes it appears to be bringing back results from the other blogs on the site. I have set it only to search the cartoons directory I think but I'm not familiar enough with their interface to be sure I'm doing everything correctly.

It seems to work well though because it searches the alt tags of the cartoons-- all our cartoons have the caption from the cartoon set as the alt tag (was I thinking ahead or what??). So as long as you remember something from the title we give the cartoon OR the caption you should be able to find the cartoon.

For example, the title for this weeks cartoon is "A deadly game...", but searching for Death will find it because Death is mentioned in the caption. Same goes for the cartoon my brother was searching for. He remembered it was something to do with exposure... and sure enough searching for exposure through the Atomz search brings back the cartoon "When will I be famous" which has exposure in the caption.

So... so far so good. Any feedback or suggestions more than welcome as always!