Search

Table of Contents

Search This Website

For some reason, only A9 search works! I'll update this page occasionally as I figure out how to get other search sites working.

A9.com:
Google Images:
Google		Broken! Weirdly, Google Image searches work, but not text searches. This used to work, something broke on the Google server side recently.
Ask.com		Broken! See How Search APIs should Work
MSN Search		Broken! See How Search APIs should Work
Yahoo!		Broken! See How Search APIs should Work

I've ordered the engines in order of

1) How valuable I thought the search results tended to be, and

2) How usable their search API was for me as a website programmer

The bottom three (ask, msn, yahoo) were all equally broken so I ordered them alphabetically.

How Search APIs should Work

I figure a search engine "works" if it does these three things for web developers:

1) No scripting required. A static HTML form should do it.

2) Have to be able to search for arbitrary terms, scoped to a website.

3) Have to also filter based on the pattern of the URL.

Any search engine marked as "Broken!" above failed one or more of the above 3 criteria.

A common problem was that engines didn't support static HTML forms properly (!). For instance, most engines support scoping searches to a website, but they only support it in their own UI, not from an external web post.

A9 works, but barely. It requires many hidden form fields.

Google Images works fantastically well. I don't know why no one else (including Google website searches!) follows their model.