Pro Blog Design

Back in December I swapped from using the regular WordPress search to using Google Custom Search. The change was very easy to make and Diogo Iglésias wrote up an easy tutorial for it here.

The reason for the change was simple; Google is a great search engine. I realized that every time I wanted to search my own site, I was going to Google and typing in “site:problogdesign.com” and then searching there. If I don’t want to use my own site search, who does?

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It can be very tedious to navigate through a category on a WordPress blog. Your navigation options tend to be limited to “Next Page”/”Previous Page".

Not the most efficient method in the world…

When you do a search on Google, you can skip to page 3, 4, 5 or anything else. And once you do, you can always click back to page 1. It makes flicking through a large number of results much, much easier.

So, why don’t we recreate that in WordPress? Milo is going to show us how.

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The search page in a WordPress blog is normally a bit of an after-thought. I know that until I replaced the WordPress page here with a Google search page, my search results were just like any other category page.

You can do a lot to improve your search results page though. In this post, milo has shown us some of her best techniques for creating a far more useful page.

We will start by adding a counter for the number of results found, then we will highlight the search times in the results themselves, and finally, show you how you can exclude certain categories from your results.

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Do you know that every time a person searches your blog you could make money?

Follow this tutorial and you’ll be surprised.

Why should you use Google Custom Search?

Because the WordPress search function isn’t the best. WordPress just lists every post with the search terms in it, with no priority given to the most relevant posts. Also, WordPress search doesn’t allow you to make money from it, but Google Search does.

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Every blog has a search bar. The search bar is a typically boring affair, with a white background and a button saying “Search,” and worst of all, it takes up a fair bit of room in your sidebar. Why not use a little Javascript to liven things up and save space? This effect can be seen in use on the search bar to your right.

NB – This method is primarily for Wordpress, but could be easily adapted to any other platform.

1 – Find The Default Search bar.

The code for your search bar usually lies in searchform.php, or in functions.php if it has been set up as a widget, and will look as follows:

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