Roll Your Own Domino Search Engine

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The subject of searching multiple Domino websites came up yesterday when Martin Scott's "Super Search" was mentioned. While it's a useful resource it's very outdated (and annoying if you don't realise it's going to spawn a whole load of new windows). Times have moved on and there are more elegant ways of searching multiple (related) websites at once.

One such way is to use a service like Rollyo.com, which lets you list the domains for which you want results returned. Here's a page which lets you search a small subset of the Domino sites out there:

http://rollyo.com/jakehowl/domino_sites/

There's a link on that page that will let you add the search engine to your browser's search field, which you can also do for codestore using the instruction on the search form.

Or you can do a search from this form, which you could embed on your own site:

Rollyo uses Yahoo search (I think). Like everybody else (or so it seems) I'd rather use Google to do the searching. Unsurprisingly they offer their own way of restriciting search results to certain domains, called Google Coop.

There's already a Google custom search for Lotus Domino:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=008231444553199791783:dql4bnwwnf8

You can test it using the form below. Oddly there's no way to add it to your browser's search feature. It could be hacked but I'll only do that if one of you ask me to.

So, there you have it. There are at least two ways you can easily search just Domino sites. That way can do a search safe in the knowledge you won't be following dead ends to results from sites like Expert Exchange and the like.

Comments

Colin Williams (Thu 4 Sep 2008 05:22 AM) e-mail

Thank you sir, banking that right now!

Dragon Cotterill (Thu 4 Sep 2008 07:16 AM) website / e-mail

Actually Opera (my browser of choice) allows you to specify your own search engines and urls.

Go Tools->Preferences->Search then you can add or ammend as you see fit. If you add a key you can shorten the whole thing so that typing "ry codestore" in the addressbar runs the Roll Your Own search for the phrase "codestore".

I have the standard "g" search for standard google searching. I use "ga" for anime websites, and "gd" for Domino websites. Just one more reason Opera still wins the browser wars as far as I'm concerned.

Greg (Thu 4 Sep 2008 10:25 AM)

Glad I could help you have a filler article out there....I feel special. Thanks for saying I am out of date....haha...kidding. I will definately use this new solution.

Rebecca Dorman (Thu 4 Sep 2008 07:23 PM) e-mail

Thanks Jake, this looks really handy.

Patrick Kwinten (Fri 5 Sep 2008 01:45 AM) website / e-mail

{Link}

here is another search by Google.

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