I’m wondering what’s your opinion as a blog user. Should a personal blog have a search functionality? I never cared that much because I created an Alfred custom search that returns results on google using the site: operator and so when I need to find something on my site I do that.
Do you use search when available on other blogs? Do you find it useful?
If I really, really wanted to search an entire blog, I’d pull the whole thing down with wget and then use grep.
Seriously, though: I don’t implement search on my static website because the whole point of a static website (IMO) is that there’s no server-side or client-side code involved.
However, if I was using a CMS like ClassicPress I might as well provide a site search because all of the requisite functionality is already implemented. I suspect Kirby could also provide a search function despite being a file-based CMS and not using a database.
I don’t think a blog needs a search necessarily, but it can be helpful. Not all pages might be indexed by a search engine, for example. I recently used the search on an embroidery blog to find posts about a specific technique.
I doubt I’ll ever implement one on my site; it’s also a static site, and I’d like to keep it that way. I do try to add tags for certain topics to make it easier to find blog posts related to them. Although I generally only add tags for things I think I might write about more than once, or things I personally care about categorizing, so who knows how helpful they are for other folks!
Kirby does indeed have a search functionality so it’s not hard to add to my site. I just never needed it personally and I don’t know if people actually use it so I don’t want to add bloat to my site for no reason, hence my question.
That’s my issue with the whole search situation. I personally don’t need it. And it’s my site. Should I do something just because others may need it? Maybe? I don’t like to tag or to add categories because I blog about whatever and I like to that way. And my entire site, as far as I can tell, is indexed by search engines. And the whole point of a search engine is to let you search on a site. But maybe other people have different opinions which is why I’m asking here.
I found this (bad?) example: Search with Lunr.js | Jekyll Codex
Really this is an example of what not to do because it adds overhead to every page that runs synchronously and grows linearly with the site.
My site uses no JS and it will stay that way. I can do the search server side.
Possibly you could have a search form with the GET method and keep the JS on only that page. Many more people (on neocities and similar sites) are constrained by being unable to run code on the server side.
i think it depends on what kind of blog it is! for an advice blog or a cooking blog or a review blog, i would say a search function is absolutely necessary, but for personal blogs or something more general or entertaining it’s handy but not critical. i generally only use it there’s a specific post i want to find, usually i’m happy with just using tags or whatever their archive looks like to navigate personal/general blogs.
I went back and forth on this for a while. Eventually I decided to add search support just to make my own life easier. I store everything in a MariaDB, and while I could just run a query directly, this is easier. I doubt anyone else even knows that it exists, let alone uses the feature.
As a user, I can only think of a handful of times that I’ve ever performed a search. Most of the time I’ve relied on tags/categories to sift through old content. Although I think the target audience for digging deeply into old personal blog entries is relatively small to begin with.
TL;DR: If you don’t see the utility, I wouldn’t bother.
Super sidebar: I had similar reservations about adding tags to entries as I face almost unspeakable difficulty trying to categorize things that I wrote. The first and last time I used Gen AI for anything site-related was a desperate attempt to ask the machine to hallucinate tags for me based on content. It sort of worked, but the result felt hollow and wrong. So I threw that all away and have added tags whenever I can manage to do it manually.
I run everything on a VPS so there’s no problem for me to run a normal search. My issue is not how to do it, that’s a solved problem. I’m wondering if I should do it at all and if it’s worth adding.
That’s where I’m currently at. I don’t think it’s necessary and if someone needs to find a specific post they can easily do that using a search engine. I think part of the fun on a personal site is to explore and click around.
Yeah for me I only search a blog/website if I’m trying to find something I already know is there. If I’m trying to see if there are pages relating to a certain topic I am much more likely to use tags or other navigation means provided by the site.
That said, if you think search would be fun and interesting to implement, or if it would be useful for you, go for it!
So funnily enough I can already search inside the site in my backend and I think I use that functionality maybe once every couple of months if I need to edit something in a specific page (usually it’s to update the list of blog platforms)
But I don’t think a search on a site like mine is all that necessary but I’m always happy to be proven wrong which is why I asked here for opinions
Definitely not useful for me, I already have two ways to search through my content, three actually considering it’s file based so I can just grab the entire content folder and throw it to my text editor and search using that.
I’m more interested in figuring out if this is something other people use because I don’t like to add features to my site that no one uses.
No, I don’t think so. I’m happy enough to browse through category or tag systems when needed.
i don’t think i’ve ever used a search function on a blog. the only scenario where i could imagine myself wanting one would be if i’ve somehow lost my personal bookmarks and browser history, and there’s a particular old post i’m trying to find again. even then, i’d probably just scroll through a chronological list instead of searching.
The bigger, the older, the more information intense, the more technical a blog is the more important having a site search is. There are some huge personal blogs out there and search often comes in handy. On a small blog with few posts or a micro blog with most posts musing about misplacing ones slippers, search is less important.
Interesting. Do you have a threshold in mind? Like does it need to have 100 posts? 1000?
One additional consideration; context matters.
On your page, Manu, I wager that the most popular content is your People & Blogs series. I also suspect that searching for a particular person is a reasonable usage. However, unless I’m mistaken, your page currently lists every single entry title/link historically at the bottom. Someone could just as easily Ctrl-F (or whatever the appropriate OS equivalent is) to find something. Introducing an explicit search field might not add a whole lot of “value”
