Wednesday, 19 August 2020

Search keys

I have been in the habit of grouping related posts together by means of search keys, for example 'hcc',  which was used to link together the three posts about a visit to Hampton Court in March. The search key was deliberately chosen so as to be unlikely to occur in natural language. And I think it worked at the time.

However, at reference 1, a search today using this key, still turns up the three posts wanted, but now includes some posts which are not wanted. I check using the 'find on page' feature of Microsoft Edge, to find that 'hcc' does not occur in these unwanted posts. So is the Google Blogger search feature (top left) doing something odd? Is it searching the underlying html, rather than the text included in the page generated by that html? Underlying html which might contain all kinds of odd strings which I don't know about. My belief being that it is the html which is stored in the Blogger database, compiled and ready to go. Not the text which I put in and which has to go through a (named) template to turn it into html for display by a browser like Edge. A storage arrangement which does at least avoid problems when templates are updated.

A sample of such html is snapped above, including all kinds of Google generated identifiers which might well include the short strings which I am using for search keys.

Then I try searching for 'sre', used to mark posts about some aspect of consciousness that I am interested in or working on, as at reference 2. A key chosen because it is the next in the series after 'srd'. And inspection of the search results using 'find on page' reveals that I am quite fond of the word 'disregard', which includes 'sre' as a sub-string. So maybe the Blogger search is going in for sub-strings too. Perhaps including sub-strings of the Google identifiers mentioned above.

Should I move up from 'sre' to 'srf', just to get away from the disregards? But I try that and find that it turns up lots of posts, despite none of them appearing to contain the string 'srf'.

Is there any interaction between all this and the ongoing template update action from the Blogger people, noticed, for example, at reference 4?

I should add that the Blogger search feature is rather impressive in other ways, for example in the way that a search picks up new posts more or less immediately after posting. No long wait while it gets around to indexing the new post. While Bing is quite good at finding posts directly from Edge, at least on my laptop, where it knows me, providing one gives it the clue 'psmv'. Helpfully not needing the full clue, as in 'psmv3' or whatever. While Google does not seem to be much good at finding posts at all.

The sort of inquest that can burn up far too much of the available quality time.

PS: the intended use of 'sre' and its friends is explained at reference 5. Perhaps, in all the circumstances, no bad thing that searches for same will now include the present post, by way of warning the reader.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=hcc.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=sre.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=srf.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/ripening-fruit.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-further-update-on-seeing-red.html.

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