Please search before you post…
I am one of those persons who like to tell people in the forum that they should do a search before they ask a question. Unfortunately after some time I found out that it is sometimes really hard to get good search results with the forum search so I stopped adding those comments to my posts. I thought about writing a blog which explains how to use the SDN search as effectively as possible. I also wanted to include how to use Google to search for SDN content. Fortunately I never wrote this blog because two days ago I found a better solution.
Google Custom Search Engine
Google offers a pretty neat service which allows you to build yourself a customized search engine which only returns results from selected sources. So following the example of http://www.searchdotnet.com/. I started to build one for the SAP world.
The result is this little site.
It not only searches the SDN forums, weblogs, wikis. It checks help.sap.com and also looks at sapgenie.com for content. Of course, this is only the beginning. Over the time I will add more relevant sites.
Make searching even more convenient. Add a Firefox keyword!
Maybe some of you guys already know how to use the Firefox keyword feature for all the others here is a complete description.
Firefox search keywords make it very easy to start a search. It allows you to enter a search directly into the the location field. Firefox takes the query and delegates it to a website which you specify with a keyword.
An example (sap is the keyword):
In order to get this working with the custom search engine follow these easy steps.
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Go the site for the custom search engine by clicking on this link. Then right click on the inputfield and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”
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Enter the keyword you want to use and a name for the bookmark which will be created.
- Finished 🙂
Contribute
It is possible to contribute to this search engine for example by adding more sources. So if you have a good idea please contribute. Or maybe you have an idea for a different search engine…
Again though remember it won’t find everything…
But my blog has a different focus so I think it still adds value to SDN. I tried to find other blogs but could not find any. The only other thing which I found was a forum post about google coop:
SAP Force Search Engine ?!?!
Btw if you search with the sdn search for google + coop the post will not show up.
cheers Thomas
for some reason I am not able to explain, TREX is the strangest search engine I ever came across.
when I search help.sap.com I use google like ‘searchterm site:.help.sap.com’ and have a (at least subjective) feeling that I get the better result set.
maybe once we get someone from the TREX team to explain the strange behaviour in a blog here.
anton