Search

On Tuesday September 22nd, 2009 (tomorrow) I'll be giving a lightening talk at Seattle NetTuesday on free tools that nonprofit organizations can use to develope and execute a listening strategy to enhance their use of social media and the web.

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If you haven't heard yet, Microsoft and Yahoo! have inked a 10 year deal to partner on search and advertising.  You can learn more about the details of the deal, which I won't go into here.  If the deal is approved by regulators, we could see changes in Yahoo and Bing search and advertising early next year, from the sound of it.

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In this fifth and final article in our series on creating an SEO strategy we will tackle the topic of community. Websites are not like the "field of dreams" -- if you build it, they won't necessarily come. Certainly if you do everything right up to this point: write good content, use appropriate markup and install the right Drupal modules, the search engines will index your site. However, when you start receiving quality inbound links is when your organic search results will increase exponentially.

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In Part 3 of Creating An SEO Strategy we discussed ways of writing better HTML markup in your content. In this part of the series, we will discuss some Drupal specific modules and tips, as well as other resources for learning more about SEO.

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In Part II of Creating An SEO Strategy, Ron focused on content and keywords. But there is more to content than just the keywords. The markup and code underneath can make your content even more attractive to search engines and help your visitors find what they are looking for faster.

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During our retreat in Playa Del Carmen MEX over the summer, Jacob Singh (now a CivicActions Alumnus, Class of 2008) showed and explained to me a project he was working on to create a hosted Solr Search service for Drupal. Solr (via the Solr Integration module written and maintained by Robert Douglas) provides a method to bring very robust faceted search to Drupal sites. A few weeks ago, Jacob went to work with Acquia in order to bring this product to the masses. Read about Acquia's hosted Solr Search plans.

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The ApacheSolr module allows the integration of the core search module with the power of the Apache Solr search platform. Aside from better performance the most prominent feature is the addition of faceted search. In essence it's a user-friendly manner to search for content by filtering on author, content type, taxonomy,... You can try a demonstration on the search pages of Robert Douglass, author of the ApacheSolr module. Now, not everyone has the resources to set up a server with Apache Solr, be it an actual dedicated server to run the software on or the funds to rent one. Luckily, there's also the Faceted Search module that provides similar functionality without this extra requirement. You can check out the demonstration by David Lesieur and see how it compares to Robert's. Faceted Search also has a couple of extra features that make it a worthy competitor.

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After a couple months of development. The google appliance module is now published on drupal.org! This module allows drupal developers and site administrators to plug into google's enterprise search offerings (the GoogleMini and the Google Search Appliance). I've written a little how-to and announcement on my personal site entitled Google Appliance Integration with Drupal It is currently in beta, so any lucky google appliance users out there, please bang on it! Thanks, J

Surf Canyon, one of my favorite search add-ons to improve Google search, auto-updated today - reminding me that I've been meaning to share this for the Way We Work. Basically, Surf Canyon helps you find information deep within the search results. As you search in Google (or Yahoo or MSN), the results you click go on to train Surf Canyon to find links more relevant to what you are looking for. In the case of the example image below, searching for the Media Mover module in Google, I am able to quickly find the Drupal Video Group as well, pulled in from page 3. Surf Canyon works with Firefox (and Internet Explorer, if you must).

Here is an (incomplete) rundown of the various 'similar/related node' type modules:

	Manually entered	Parsed links	Search/analysis of title/body	Taxonomy	Same content type
Related Links	☺	☺	☺	☺
Related Block			☺
Similar by Terms				☺
Similar Entries			☺
Relevant Content				☺	☺

It should be pointed out that while related links is one of the oldest of the bunch, and has most features, it is not quite as flexible as people are looking for (which I think is the main reason for the other modules), and the UI is not always easy to understand.

Here is what I would like to see - a module that (on node creation/edition and also regularly refreshed on cron) provides a hook to allow various modules to add in some numeric factors for how that node relates to other nodes. These modules could have their own configuration (e.g. to only pull from certain vocabularies), and the central API would allow you to weight one module/factor against another (e.g. taxonomy similarity v.s. word similarity v.s. destination node votes or freshness).

It would basically then just dump this information into a table and provide it to views as a sort option (that would need to load a node from an NID passed in an argument to provide a 'relevant' sort). This would allow you to display it per content type or whatever. For bonus points there would be a way for Content Recommendation Engine or other modules with user specific input to add their influence to the final list.