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January 7, 2008

A Search Engine from Every Collection of Links

So you've found a great web page that lists a lot of interesting links about a certain topic and now you're ready to explore them, but you don't have enough time to read everything. A good option would be to create a custom search engine, but it's too time-consuming. A faster way is to create a custom search engine on-the-fly from all the links included in the page you've found. That means you'll have a search engine restricted to all the domains, subdomains and web pages linked from your page.

For example, del.icio.us search results pages are a good place to obtain a list of authoritative sites on a topic like AJAX. Once you have the del.icio.us URL, paste it at Google's on-the-fly search engine factory and enter your query.


Other good starting points could be: Wikipedia articles, other wikis, directories, scholar papers, pages with many references etc. Maybe Google should create a separate search engine for pages that have a lot of external links related to a topic (like these pages).

7 comments:

  1. Does Google CSE still has the limit of 5000 URLs? My del.icio.us account has long passed that limit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Either I don't understand what this thing is supposed to do or it is seriously broken. (Probably the former).

    ReplyDelete
  3. If I start from your first link it works fine (and I already had a custom search defined, but it was a bit out of date).

    If I start from your last link, I seem to be getting almost exclusively, links to someone else's blog (not mine, not yours), even though I don't find any reference to that blog in the generated code.

    Really screwy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Executive summary:
    This service lets you create a search engine restricted to all the links from a web page. Use the "try it out" section to enter the URL of the page and your query.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think this is phenomenal.
    I visit rockbox.org and this service helped me find the info i need faster than their own search!

    Thank you for sharing this.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is just what I've been looking for for a looong time!

    Q: Why?

    A: Because now I can use my Firefox bookmarks.html as my personal search engine. That's why!

    Hope it works and is not restricted to 5000 links.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Host the CSE annotations XML on your own website and you can break the 5,000 URL limit.

    ReplyDelete

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