Many folks (including me) are occassionally (or even frequently) frustrated in our ability to find answers to our CiviCRM questions. It may be:
- finding a particular page on the Wiki that documents a feature
- finding forum posts that might have answers to a tech support problem
- finding a blog post that covers a new / unique way to implement a custom extension
- ... and on and on
The existing search features on the wiki and the forum sometimes fall short, and there's no way search across all the various places that might have the answer you need. So... we've implemented a Google Custom Search Engine which allows you to search across all civicrm.org sites in one place (AND the online book site as well). The new search is linked from the top of every page on the main CiviCRM.org site - and I'll be adding it to the header for the other sites shortly (Wiki, Issue Tracker, Forums).
When you click the Search link, you'll get to a page with a search field. Type in your search term, using any special formatting as you would in a normal Google search. Initially all CiviCRM sites are searched. However, once you get some results you can narrow down your search to just the Forums, or Documentation sites (wiki and online book), or Blog Posts, or the Issue Tracker.
Try it out and let us know how it works for you! In my own experiments, it seems that the Issue Tracker pages are only sporadically indexed - and I plan on investigating this a bit in the coming days to see if we can improve it.
Comments
Dave - good move - but am a bit confused as not seeing this on the wiki
But not sure if it will confuse folks since each of those tools exposes their own search block. I guess we'll see what the feedback is.
Strange - I'm sure I commented on this a day or two ago, but the comment is gone now.
Will be delighted to see this on forum search too. The SMF search engine regularly insists there's nothing to see here, move along, when searching for various things. The new search engine offers a much better view of things - I say, kill the built-in search from SMF at least :)
It will probably help forum users no end to see search results from the Wiki (and even from JIRA).
Oh I see - comments have to be previewed AND THEN saved. That'll be why my comment didn't appear after all.
I've had some frustrations w/ SMF's built-in search as well. But I'd like to get a bit more / specific feedback to verify that the new search will return everything useful that SMF would have returned AND MORE - before we disable SMF search. Even then, we might see about offering both searches in a bit clearer way:
"Search All CiviCRM Sites"
"Search Forums Only"
Would it be possible to provide a filter by date option on this - being able to sift out the old from the newer posts/wiki etc would be a good improvement IMO.
This is simply a configured instance of a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). I don't think there's a date filter option - but you can check out their doc and see if I'm missing something.