Matt's Blog

As many people who use WordPress to power their blog know, WordPress’ built-in search isn’t exactly as useful as you’d expect it to be. Recently, I’ve become quite frustrated with this fact.

So, a couple of days ago, I decided to setup Google Custom Search and see how I like it. It was fairly painless to setup, and I had it up and running in less than 5 minutes. I decided to host it on my domain, instead of directly on Google, so that I would be able to style it to look the same as my blog.

I’ve found Google Custom Search to work much better than WordPress’ built-in search. It returns more relevant results, and doesn’t provide you with tons of pages that are hardly relevant to your search terms. I’ve decided to completely replace WordPress’ search with Google Custom Search, and you can now use it in the sidebar of this blog, or from right here.

I’ve also made the meta descriptions of post pages to be relevant to what the post is about, and also blocked Google from indexing some pages (such as yearly/monthly archives and category pages) that contain duplicate content. So, in the next coming weeks, as Google reindexes pages in my blog, the search results should become even more useful (and not contain links to yearly/monthly archives and category pages, which aren’t really that useful if you’re searching for something).

What do you think about Google Custom Search, and do you think it works better than WordPress’ search?

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