Adding a Lit & Lat Forum Search to your Browser

General
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(In response to this post.)

Thanks, that is a good deal more specific and useful to me as critique. Checking the logs, it looks like Google is about 3,500 page views through its crawl, so it shouldn’t be too much longer before it has a good picture of the new URL structure—there isn’t a whole lot we can do about moving that along, it is inevitable whenever a site structure changes and there are no gradual ways to address that, as you suggest.

Exposing a new site to search spiders is by definition exposing it to the world, and realistically before it is ready to be accessed and used. That would be highly confusing to everyone, as you now have two completely different sites on the web. Best you can do is set up your redirects correctly and hope you have a high priority with the engines (which we should be decent on).

Creating your own browser search bar

So you can wait that out, but for further consideration: the search feature in the new forum is quite a bit better than the old one. In the past, using a web search engine was often the only way to get good results. You mention browser integration being your main reason, but that should not be a problem.

Any decent browser will allow you to create your own integrated web searches—some will even do this automatically. For any site that I frequently search, I do just that, and it’s a whole lot easier than adding “site:forum.literatureandlatte.com” to your browser search bar first, and often results in a superior experience since the search results are integrated with the site itself, rather than being in some different site entirely. You can, in a dynamic search system like we have here, easily refine your search by values that are not possible to refine by, externally (like weeding out topics that only have 1 post, if you’re looking for answers, not questions).

The new forum supports OpenSearch technology, which is how many modern browsers detect search configuration settings and allow you to easy add that page’s search engine to your browser’s URL or search bar. For example, in Firefox, when you visit our search page, you’ll see a green “+” in the search field. Click that, and now the L&L forum is fully integrated with your browser and as easy to use as any mainstream search engine.

Optional manual setup

Manual Setup

Some browsers give you a little more power and you can create your own searches, often as an extension of the bookmarking system, or somewhere in settings.

  1. Run a test search using the site’s search field (I use “CONFIGURE” to make it easy to find in the subsequent URL). Optionally set any constraints in the UI (such as which categories to search for, or add your user name to create a self-post search).

  2. Copy the URL out of the browser field, and paste it somewhere convenient to edit it. Here is a generic search request for our forum:

    https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/search?expanded=true&q=CONFIGURE

  3. How to change this depends on the browser. To use my browser as an example, Vivaldi, I would modify this to the following and set it up in Search Engines section of settings:

    https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/search?expanded=true&q=%S

    What you type into the search field gets inserted at the “%S” position in this particular browser.

  4. These are usually accessed via a keyword, like ‘sf’ (for Scrivener Forum). To use it, you would type ‘sf what I want to search for’ into the URL bar.

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Okay, that is seriously cool, and I just took a few minutes to figure out how it all works in Edge Chromium. VERY NICE!

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Oh, so that’s what that button does!

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Hi AmberV,

Will this work for Safari?

If so, how can I implement this with Safari?

Thanks,
scrive
:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Well, I did say any decent browser… :wink:

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In Safari, if enabled, typing lit followed by a search term is enough to initiate a search of the L&L forums.

Merx

Safari search
Safari search904×200 11.9 KB

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Any idea how to do this in Microsoft Chromium Edge? I don’t see green “+” anywhere.

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That said, I question your reasoning. By your logic we should still be running Apple ][ and MS-DOS computers (and of course, whatever you started out with is what a Real Computer is). After all, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh System were a complete rewrite (well sorta, in one case) of the operating system, again, which just expected people to be okay with the changes.

I didn’t quite phrase what I meant in the most eloquent way, but perhaps a better way to phrase what I meant was:
The changes are frustrating because google has yet to reindex your forum. Therefore all external searches lead to dead pages. This external form of search tends to be be better, since the search is integrated into my browser, and Google search engine only does search, making it find better results.

Change can be good, but what caught me off guard is it was sudden, and not done in a way that was handled gracefully. It was the disruption that it caused that is my chief complaint.

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The link in the paragraph directly prior to the one you quoted has a bunch of howtos for different browsers, Edge is in there as well if you scroll down a bit (they are alphabetically organised).

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Darn my eyes! Thanks for quickly pointing that out. I’m undercaffeinated, no doubt! I’ll give that a shot.

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Oh, you mean this four-and-a-half-year-old link here? Nah. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, that doesn’t work. That’s for setting my default search engine, I believe.

I thought this was going to be like when I type en in my search bar and en.wikipedia.org and suggests that, if I press tab, I can search Wikipedia.

I thought if I began typing forum.literatureandlatte.com it would allow me to search here. This is what we’re talking about, no?

As far as I can see, it doesn’t seem to be possible on Chromium Edge.

OKAY: I spoke way too soon.

Before pressing Reply, I went back through all the steps I’d taken and thought to myself “Hey, this works for Wikipedia. How does it work for Wikipedia?” Which led to my figuring it out.

So, on the chance it might help someone else set up this, I’ll tell what I did:

I searched my settings for Wikipedia and examined the three results for Wikipedia which took me to the search engines page I’d already visited. The three results were all on one line of three columns with the name of the search engine, Wikipedai (en), a keyword, en.wikipedia.com, and a link to the search page. The next line (for me, anyway) just under that had a search engine named Literature & Latte Forums Search, a keyword that might have read forum.literatureandlatte.com, and the link to the L&L search page.

I tried typing forum.literatureandlatte.com in my address bar and it gave me the chance to search at these forums! I said it might have read that, because discovered I can rename the keyword, which I did to flls (for “forum.literatureandlatte.com search” which is much faster to enter on the address bar.

I hope this helps someone else.

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Thanks for posting the clarification. I think in a worst case, for sites where Chrome cannot pick up the search settings on its own, you can always click the ‘Add’ button to create your own search, using the optional manual setup procedure I described above—which the site in question also mentions as a fallback.

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This is interesting, and the new forum search engine is very effective, if Google has its place too, for finding what others say.

I wanted it most on my iPad, to go with Scrivener iOS, and found that the Brave browser does alternative search engines very nicely, and works with Scrivener.

Points:

  1. for a link, just open the forum search and copy its URL, use that
  2. you paste it into a new Custom Search item, from Settings:Search (at bottom)
  3. you don’t have to worry about any %s item — it’s automatically taken care of
  4. the hardes thing: finding how to use a so-called Quick-Search like this!
  5. the answer is, type your search in the bar as usual, then look at very bottom of screen
  6. there you choose an icon to use its search engine…quite easy when you know how :slight_smile:

Searching this way works very nicely.

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This is brilliant- thank you!