DavePress

I’ve been playing about quite a bit with Google CSE this weekend, firstly seeing how it would work with Twitter (as mentioned here previously), and secondly now with wikis.

There is a load of great information out there on the various hosted wiki services like WikiSpaces, pbWiki, Stikipad and WetPaint to name a few. But how do you find these wikis if you want to contribute, or just to read stuff from them?

So, here’s theWikiFinder. It searches every wiki hosted at those mentioned above, along with Wikia and Wikipedia too. I tested it with the phrase “social media”, which brought up the wikipedia entry first (naturally) but second was David Wilcox’s Social Media Wiki on WikiSpaces. For some reason I feel this justifies the effort putting it all together - it works!

Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.

Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results - taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.

The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.

To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!

While I was in the customised search mood, I thought it might be useful to have one for the upcoming barcampukgovweb. Click the logo below to jump to it.