Woo! The search is on!

Check out this google search for Batman: Hush on my site. As you can see, it is now properly linking to the book placed in order on the page it is ON instead of on the first page of the order. And it’s also got much more comprehensive listings!

Webmaster tools told me that prior to uploading the sitemap only about 40% of the permalinks were indexed. hooboy! Seeing as I already get about 70% of the traffic here from google, I’m wondering if I’m about to see a fairly large increase.

Hope the server can take it.

In any case, this should make the in site search work better, I think! I’m gonna try it out now (funny how you’re not going to see any time pass because this is a blog post).

… (this is to represent time passing while I test it, duh)

Hmm.. not quite better yet. Lets try refreshing the index at the Google Custom Search control panel.

…

tiny bit better. I’m going to try adding a “refinement” that users can select.

…

Ah, I just realized that I’m not seeing very good results on this because google has an older cached version of the first page of the Recommended Reading Order. Since the book I was looking for “Batman: Year One” was listed on that page, it was consistently giving me the wrong one. Trying it with “Batman: Hush” gives me similarly outdated results – they’re a page or two off.

This must be because I’ve been adding in books towards the start of the order and they are bumping this other books down – and google hasn’t refreshed the pages yet. I think I can set them to a higher priority in my sitemap and hopefully this will clear itself up in a few days.

Let me know if you guys have any feedback about how the custom search is working and if it’s helping you at all!

Comment!

(me, working on this website)

Now I’m waiting for the sitemap to update at google webmaster tools. It wasn’t that hard to make with the plugin, though I did have to paste in links to all the RRO pages by hand, since it doesn’t do pagination for some reason… if this works I should probably do the other lists as well.

Since I’ve got a minute, I want to mention some awesomeness.

Daniel Davis, mild mannered internet browser by day, is a fricking super hero to me right now. Him an Alex J. could start a TPBro justice league.

He emailed me letting me know how much he appreciated my work (always awesome to feel appreciated) and offering his help if I needed another OCD trade paperback nut on my side. I told him that besides letting his friends know about the site, what I need most is specific advice for books in the reading order.

The easiest way to do that is just by leaving a comment on the exact book that you think there may be a problem with – even if I disagree, I’ll look it over and reply and our public discussion should help other site users deciding where to place to book on their shelf.

So this is exactly what he did!

Daniel noticed that Batman: Hush Returns contained a page of pretty solid spoilers for War Games and an issue that takes place far after. I was only peripherally aware of the issue, but not at all of the spoiler sheet – and it’s exactly the kind of thing I like to know about!

After reading his comment, I agreed on his suggested placement. Book is moved and re-placed!

Oh, and since this sitemap isn’t up yet anyway, I went and updated Hush Returns while I was at it. So that’s one more book with a cover and all its tags, for what it’s worth!

Comment!

I’ve tweaked the formatting of the search results page a bit. You can go ahead and try a search if you’re curious to see it.

Since the ads before and after the results were horrible, I had to go with the only other option, which has ads to the right of the results. This, unfortunately, left no room for the sidebar.

While I think that’s a major inconvenience, I can probably add a “back to home” link up top and hopefully most people won’t get lost.

So, theoretically, this search would work for what we want. However, the problem I’m running into is that google seems to have only indexed an extremely small portion of the site and database, and hasn’t gone near getting to the multiple pages of the Recommended Reading Order, for example.

It seems, though, that submitting a sitemap to google’s webmaster tools might help with this.

So I’ve found a wordpress sitemap generating plugin and I’m going to try that out.

If this works, I can create a set of links in the google custom search settings that will allow you to chose which list you want to refine your search by and so on.

Crossing my fingers. It would be sweet if this could actually work tonight.

Comment!

So, the reason I signed up for adsense was I could have a google powered search for free. The only downside is there are some pretty big ads on the top and bottom of it.

In any case, I’m working on refining it and trying to get it working for the purposes of this site. So you’ll see a google search box in the sidebar right now, but I can’t guarantee it will help you find anything useful yet.

Stay tuned – I’ll post an update if I’ve got it figured out any better, promise!

Comment!

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