lgsearch

Here are the latest stats from LGSearch:

I’ve been playing around a little more with Google Coop, and discovered that you can use wildcards when defining the sites you want to search.

The way the standard LGSearch works is that I provide Google with a list of the sites I want it to search. Every single one of them. It’s not fun. But it does mean I can tag them with the category of site it falls into, making the filtering possible.

But with LGSearch.Gov.uk I just submitted one ‘site’ – *.gov.uk. In other words, every site that ends with .gov.uk! This means that as new sites are added, or taken away, the search engine will update automatically.

I don’t think this will be as useful as the standard LGSearch, but it might be a useful second option if you can’t find what you want first time round.

You might wonder why I haven’t put education sites into LGSearch. Well, the reason is that someone else already has done, and I’m not in the business of thunder stealing.

The new links page at LGSearch reveals all. At the moment, the links are limited to three, but they are good ones. The first two are both from Simon Dickson‘s Findless project: Health and Safety and Education.

The third is DirectionlessGov, which lets you compare the results you get from Direct.gov.uk and Google. No prizes for guessing which produces the better links.

[tags]findless, simon dickson, directionlessgov, lgsearch[/tags]

The ‘slicing’ of the RSS feeds is now working, so now only 10 items per feed are displayed. I had only tested the layout in FireFox at the weekend, and having now tested it in IE 5.5 the feeds carry on to the right of the screen, needing a scroll. I don’t know if this is the same for more up to date versions of IE – if anyone can check, this would be great!