search engine Posts 📝

I recently launched a search engine for my blog, allowing visitors to find pages on my website. The search engine lets you search through page "h1"s (a new change, previously the engine supported "title" tags instead), meta descriptions, and URLs to find the resources that you need. For instance, you could search "Aeropress" and get a list of all of my Aeropress-related posts.

As you might know, Google weighs various factors when ranking a web page to certain extents. Factors like whether a keyword is in a title are a strong indicator that the article is likely to be relevant to a target keyword. Thus, that article will be considered more relevant than, say, an article that only mentions the keyword once or twice. I will leave the exact logic behind Google to people who know more about this topic than I.

TL;DR: I now have a search engine on my blog at search.jamesg.blog. Check it out!

Back when I was working on my thermal printer project, I decided to build a random Aeropress recipe generator. The idea was that I would get a new Aeropress recipe in print every morning so that I could push myself when I was brewing. Truthfully, I didn't use the feature much because I was quite stubborn about using recipes I had refined through practice. However, I like the idea. Embracing randomness pushes one out of their comfort zone.

I have been building a search engine for my blog. The search engine is designed to make it easy to find content on my blog. I started with a simple program that indexed content so I could keep track of my posts. I built a web interface to query the index so anyone could find search results. Then I started to add more features to make the search engine more intuitive and better at discovering content. This has been such a fun project to work on because I have had to spend a lot of time planning technical solutions and then I have implemented them, two tasks I enjoy.

The goal of my blog search engine is to make content as easy to find on my website as possible. Before the latest update, you could use my search engine to find a page based on a term that appeared either in the URL, meta description, or title of a page. However, I kept thinking about how I could enhance the search engine to make content even easier to find. Since I started thinking about this, I have looked at my search engine and made a number of improvements. Most improvements are related to either code efficiency or content discovery. In this article, I'll share a bit about how I implemented TextRank on my site.

Over the last few months, I have spent a lot of time thinking about, talking about, and building a search engine. The search engine was first designed for my blog and then I expanded it into IndieWeb Search, a search engine for the IndieWeb community. Working on this project has been interesting but also challenging. Search involves solving many different problems, even if your intention is only to build a search engine for your own website.