Brennan’s Blog

I have not been satisified with search engines lately. My problem is the fact that technologies have merged together from existing technologies, so that if you search on certain terms for a specific programming language you will often get results for an array of languages. A prime example is a search on implementing an outer join with an SQL query. These days I am most concerned with SQL Server 2005, but I often get results for Oracle, DB2 or MySQL instead.

So I definately have an interest in the reviews of next generation search engines, called Search 2.0. After a short evaluation of these search sites I am really liking ROLLYO which allows you to roll your own search engine. You are able to create a series of search profiles filtered by the websites you want included. In my ROLLYO profile, I have a .NET Search which I have targeted at the MSDN websites, .NET blogs and other .NET related websites. Now a search for "outer join" actually finds something useful to me. It's great.

Go create your own profile. And come back and post them here!

Last week we saw Script# released. Now Nikhil Kothari is realizing he could have picked a more search engine friendly name. He laments about how the # character is typically dropped off the end in searches. I have personally also found the terms .NET and ASP.NET to be very difficult with search engines. I continually try to learn new strategies to dig for the information I need. It has seemed to me that results from search engines have become less and less useful. Perhaps there is just so much stuff out there now that it is harder to digest it into nicely indexed bits.

Since I have started working with .NET 2.0 I have found it hard to get at documentation specific to .NET 2.0. I do my best to include terms which are unique to .NET 2.0 like GridView or ObjectDataSource. But sometimes I need something specific which does not include one of these unique terms. I am really looking forward to the semantic web when I will be able to filter my searches to a useful subset, such as data binding problems strategies for ASP.NET 2.0 controls. Search engines which employ tags such as del.icio.us do not yet offer the searches I want. I would like to run a keyword search attached to a specific tag, or set of tags.

A search for Design-Time Support attached to a tag like vs2005 would come up drastically different results than if I just search with just keywords because real people tagged those pages to mark them as related to Visual Studio 2005, in contrast to Visual Studio 2003 which also has Design-Time Support.

Within the context of MSDN documentation I would like to make use of such scoping. Run a search for ListBox and you will find results for a WinForms control. Since I mostly work with web applications I would like to filter out results which are clearly not related to web development. If I were running things, I would make some changes which would make it so much easier to get to what information people needed. And I would drop that annoying navigational treeview that takes up so much bandwidth and space along the left side of the web page. Where is my MSDN smart client for documentation? VS 2005 search does not quite cut it.