[wp-hackers] Page searching examples [was: 2.4 planning discussion]

[Sam Bauers]

Perhaps search should just honour robots.txt like every other search  
engine. Then you could exclude certain pages using a standard format  
file in the root directory. I haven't checked, but there is probably  
a plugin that is designed to cleverly manipulate robots.txt out there.

robots.txt can even be made to work differently for different search  
engines, so rules could be setup for external search engines that are  
more restrictive than those for the internal one if that is a concern.

Search results should probably also strip tags, this would avoid the  
problem of forms and other formatting turning up in search results.

I would prefer it if the results returned the actual context of the  
searched terms on the page, rather than a summary. Using the title is  
fine, but if I can't tell *why* my search terms matched that page or  
post I am less inclined to go to the result. So it should either  
highlight the search terms in a fragment of the content, or show that  
it is returned as one of the tags on that page/post.

This is all standard practice for search engines, why not WP's own  
search as well?

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  Sam Bauers

  sam at viveka.net.au
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