Monday, January 07, 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).

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  6 comments ( Post a comment )
Does Google CSE still has the limit of 5000 URLs? My del.icio.us account has long passed that limit.
Either I don't understand what this thing is supposed to do or it is seriously broken. (Probably the former).
If I start from your first link it works fine (and I already had a custom search defined, but it was a bit out of date).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.
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.
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.
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.