At this time Typepad does not have an internal search capability (coming soon). The workaround is to use Google site search as a substitute. The problem with that was Google has not been fully crawling my site. Typepad support gave a recommendation of Free Find. Free Find can be integrated in exactly the same way as Google find.
Setting this up was real easy. You go to freefind.com, sign up for an account, and cut and paste the HTML. The only issue I had with Free Find is that I get multiple hits for any article. That is, my individual archives get hit, along with my monthly archives, category archives, the front page, and the individual archives before and after a post (if the hit is in the title).
Fortunately, Free Find provides a way to control its indexing. So, if you are a Pro user of Typepad you can make the find more friendly. For the index archive, the template archive, the date-based, and category archives. You insert the following:
<body>For the individual archives you do this:
<!-- FreeFind Begin No Index -->
...
<!-- FreeFind End No Index -->
</body>
<!-- FreeFind Begin No Index -->You can see how it looks by doing a Free Find search of web site at The Blinne Blog.
<MTEntryPrevious>
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>">«
<$MTEntryTitle$></a> |
</MTEntryPrevious> <a href="<$MTBlogURL$>">Main</a>
<MTEntryNext> | <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$> »</a>
</MTEntryNext>
<!-- FreeFind End No Index -->
I'd also recommend Atomz search. It's worked great for me, and has many of the same sorts of customization features. In some ways it's even better than the integrated Google Search (in terms of showing the matching highlights in the post), but it's limited to only 500 pages on a site or so -- which, for most folks, isn't a problem, of course.
Posted by: *** Dave | October 10, 2003 at 02:33 PM
That was the other search recommended by Typepad support. I went with free find because atomz re-indexes every week for the free version (free find schedules daily). Looking at it again I see that I can do on-demand re-indexing. I'll check it out.
Posted by: Rich | October 10, 2003 at 02:39 PM
The weekly reindex is an issue (though it works well for more static sites). But, yeah, you can index on demand; that' a manual step, so you need to balance against whatever other features you like.
Posted by: *** Dave | October 10, 2003 at 02:50 PM