The TypePad Beta Blog

Blogside Search. Oh My!

We're proud to announce that a native, blogside search feature is available to our Beta members. The TypePad team has been hard at work the last several months to build out our very own search infrastructure. Last week we announced our Search API, which allows developers to build upon the great content in TypePad. And now we have an integrated search experience available for the blogside (you can see it live on this blog and on Everything TypePad).

Posts, pages, comments
So what’s being added to the search index? Pretty much everything that deals with the content on your blog. For this initial release, we provided the ability for readers to search for posts, pages and comments within your blog by keyword. 

Design, design, design
Many bloggers have been using 3rd party services such as Google or Lijit Search to power search on their blog. The problem with using another provider is that no matter how great the customizations are, it’s never going to look exactly like your blog. TypePad’s new blogside search feature will be fully integrated into the design of your blog.

Blogside search is available for all current and new blogs on classic themes and theme builder themes by going to:

• Blog > Design > Content
• Categories: Search Module: Add Search module
• Drag and drop the module anywhere in your sidebars

For members using advanced templates, grab the code from our Knowledge Base article. Microblog themes automatically have the search module embedded, so there’s one less step for you there!

Just the beginning…
Now that we’ve built this search infrastructure, the possibilities are endless. But first we need to know what’s working, what’s not working, and how can we make this experience better for you. Let us know in the comments what you think!

Bringing back Search

Update 2008-10-06: Thank you for testing in-app search and providing the team with great feedback.  We were able to deploy the feature to all users on the new platform last Thursday.  We’ve collected your feedback on  bringing replace back with the ability to do partial-match searches and are looking to schedule the changes in an upcoming release.  More to come in future posts! 

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We've been working hard to bring back the Search box within the TypePad application, and we have the first version to share with you for some testing. 

This version of Search is a little different than the functionality we had before.  Here's what's new and different:

• The search bar is only on the ‘List Posts’ and ‘List Pages’ sections (rather than across all the sections)
• You can only search posts OR pages separately
• Results are returned within the ‘List Posts’ or ‘List Pages’ section
• New search includes categories in the words it searchs and includes in results
• Because the results are returned in the ‘List’ sections, you can now take mass actions on the posts/pages that are returned by the search query. 

Please try out the new search on the ‘List Post’ and ‘List Pages’ sections under your weblog.

Here's what to test:

• Search for keywords in title – correct matches should be returned
• Search for keywords in body – correct matches should be returned
• Search for keywords in extended post – correct matches should be returned
• Search for keywords in keywords – correct matches should be returned
• Try some mass actions on several of the returned results, ie. assign categoriess or open comments

A note about Search/Replace:
We have not added back the Search/Replace functionality, and are trying to decide how to prioritize it.  Please give us your thoughts by answering these questions:

• Was the search/replace functionality useful to you?
• If so, how often did you use it?
• Would you rather have blog-side search over the replace feature in the near future?

Share your feedback
If you find a bug, please open a help ticket and be sure to put "beta" in the subject line.

If you have general feedback, likes/dislikes, or questions, please comment to this post!  Kimmie, the Product Manager in charge of this project, will be reading and responding to your comments.