Those of you who were familiar with the old site may remember it had a search function that disappeared when I rebuilt the site for the start of 2013 (or, the return of 1660). It was more complicated to recreate that with the new technology, and so it had to disappear. I’ve now added a search box back to the top of every page.

The bad news first: in some ways the new search function isn’t as good as the old one. You can’t restrict your search to diary entries, or annotations, or Encyclopedia topics. The new search simply searches all the text across all pages on the site at once.

In fact, the results will probably be identical to searching on Google using the site:pepysdiary.com modifier that some of you are familiar with, because this search functionality is provided by Google. So, the good news is that the search is fast, and should provide pretty relevant results.

I would like to recreate a more “faceted” search, allowing results to be filtered according to content type, as it used to be, but that is a lot more work. I thought “some search” would be better than the continuation of “no search”, so here we are.



1 Comment

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Phil.

Thanks for this!

I've found myself using Google and the site:pepysdiary.com modifier to find what's somewhere in diary entries AND memorable annotations. Sometimes Encyclopedia topics were a serendipity. So this will fill the bill for me!

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