18 January, 2005

Searching....

In case it's unclear, the Ministry is British, with Brit English spellings.  I see from my logs that someone repeatedly searched the site for 'medieval history' this morning, and left unsatisfied, as the only references here are to 'mediæval'.  Likewise, if you're looking for 'esthetic'', try 'aesthetic'.  I can't think of others as I write, but I'll probably amend this entry to add others appearing in the logs, so future searchers at least find this entry, and know how to rephrase enquiries.

I don't think it's relevant to the blog (but it is to other Ministry departments), but all abbreviated dates are in the non-US form dd/mm/yy - never mm/dd/yy.

Hmm. 'Mediæval history' wouldn't have been found either. There seems to be a slight flaw in the MT search function: the ligated 'æ' isn't recognised. One would need to expressly use the html character entity, and search for 'mediæval'. I'll try to avoid it in future. More common accented characters e.g. 'é' are accepted.

Please also note that the search feature of the blog only searches the blog, not the other departments. They have their own Google Site Search (which searches the blog too!). Hence, 'bourée' (even misspelled as 'bouree') will be readily found via that search, but will return no results at all here.
There's minimal crossover between the blog and other departments, (negligible mentions of Jethro Tull here!), so on the whole, the necessity of excluding non-blog pages from the blog search isn't usually a problem.