Using Google to search SAP sites:
Lets face it: Google is hands down the most widely used web search engine. Google search was introduced in 1998 and has since taken 80% or more of the search engine market share. I personally find google to be the most efficient search engine to find what I am looking for.
SAP sites do not offer use of the Google search engine to search its multiple websites: SDN, help.sap, focums etc. Google search however, offers some advanced options to search SAP sites specifically:
Google Advanced options:
site:xxxx
When searching Google, add the suffix site:sap.com to your query. This will restrict all of your results to only ones contained within an SAP site. Alternatively, I can restrict this further by instead adding site:sdn.sap.com to retrieve results only from the SDN (like wiki.sdn.sap.com or forums.sdn.sap.com)
Try it:
Example query: BusinessObjects SP4 upgrade site:forums.sdn.sap.com
filetype:xxx
The filetype option restricts results based on the file extension of the result. For example filetype:pdf will return only results that are in PDF format. This becomes extremely handy when trying to find only documentation. Very useful when used in conjunction with the site: option
Try it:
Example query: Deployment Guide site:sap.com filetype:PDF
Building a SAP Search Firefox plugin
Firefox offers a simplified way to write your own search plugins. In Firefox 7.0.1, these search plugins are located:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\
Navigate to this folder and you will find some search plugins that are already defined for you. Here are some easy instructions to provide you an SAP GOOGLE search plugin:
1. Navigate to the Firefox serachplugins folder,
2. Save the XML code to a file called SAPGOOGLE.xml
(Due to SDN restrictions, the xml code can be downloaded using this SAPMAT link. This should be available 100 days after the post:)
https://sapmats-us.sap-ag.de/download/download.cgi?id=HX96HS5WD48FABUR3NK20C9OI9L751CFYMU2YGS66AD6H7...
3. Restart Firefox
4. Notice the search bar includes the SAP search:
This should provide an easily accessible method to search SAP sites using these discussed google site parameters.
Happy Searching!
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