A short time ago I wrote a post asking does WordPress needed its own search function any more?. At the time I was using Google search and found it to be far superior. Now though I have found something even better.

The search on this site is now powered by Viewzi Site Search.

Viewzi does some really interesting things. First it offers a new pop-up search set of search results that contain the usual search, but, you can choose to see posts, comments, or both. Searching through the comments is really interesting.

Even better though is that it adds other methods of searching as options. For example, on this blog I have enabled the timeline option that shows all your posts on a timeline. This is amazing for finding old posts to link back to:

It can also hook into your photos via Flickr or your videos via Vidler and search those as well.

The service is pretty new, but I like it a lot. I also like that it is available as a Habari or WordPress plugin and it is really easy to install. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

I recently wrote a post asking does WordPress really needs a search function any more. The general consensus was that although there were other, easier options out there a default was still needed and despite my thoughts that it should be as an optional plugin rather than a core function I agreed with that.

Since I wrote that post I have been developing this new theme with the intention of using Google search instead of the internal search. I have now added this (Check the sidebar ) but this isn’t a direct replacement.

One of the points of the new theme was to more closely align the blogs that I have. I split one up into to two and effectively restarted part of it, and I also added a new blog for another blog platform.

The benefit of using the Google search box is that it lets me offer a search that includes all of my blogs; for example, searching for WordPress will give you any posts that mention WordPress on my other blogs.

The downside, of course, are the adverts but they come with the search so whatever right?

I still need to look at the options to see how I can best optimise it for content, rather than archives pages and similar, but on the whole I think this is a good alternative to the built in search.

When was the last time you used the search box on your blog? Well, I found myself using mine extensively over the weekend to find my old tutorials and while doing that it occurred to me that I hadn’t used a search box on a blog, any blog, for as long as I could remember.

On the whole I tend to use Google for everything. There’s a few reasons for this. First is that it tends to find stuff pretty quickly and efficiently. Far more efficiently than visiting a site and then using their search box.

The second reason is that the good search box is up there on my browser so even if I am on their blog it is second nature to type into that instead of looking around for their search box.

Despite all this I’m not suggesting that blogs shouldn’t have search boxes, just that Google, Yahoo, and I assume Microsoft ( I couldn’t find their page about it ) offer simple ways to roll your own search engine. If these were made into optional plugins for WordPress, presumably bundled with it, then the search code could be removed from WordPress altogether.

If less is more then this is something to think about.