Permalink Feature Added to Search Results Page
I have noticed that there are quite a few people using the “Search for Articles” feature on the site, which is great. I find myself using it much more than I thought I would, and I suspect that as the site grows it will become more and more handy. One thing I wanted to let people know about is that I added a “permalink” feature on the search results pages. Located at the top right of the search results, this is a link that can be copied, pasted and used to link to search results pages.
For those of you who may be wondering, the quick search form on the left side of the site searches articles for keywords or phrases. You can enclose phrases in quotes to search for that specific phrase, which I find very handy. In addition, once you are at our search results page, you can narrow your search by selecting an article category or author to search within. The permalink on these results pages will include all of that information.
The reason that I post about this is that it can be an easy way to link to our articles. Let’s say that you want to present some of our content to your users, but only a specific subset. Let’s say articles that contain a specific phrase and that appear in a specific article category. Or perhaps you want to link to all articles by a specific author that contain a certain keyword or phrase. Simply run the search that you want, and copy the permalink to the results for use anywhere. Each time someone clicks that link they will get the most recent results for that search, which can be useful.
For example, this link shows all articles that contain the phrase “practical ecommerce”. On our end, the functionality is nice because search results pages are excellent for spiders to play with.
I figured it might be helpful to someone, and if nothing else is a nice little feature to add to search results pages. Please let me know if there are more features that you would like to see added to the site. We have been getting some great feedback and I try vary hard to implement everything that we can for our visitors.
