Monday, April 24, 2017

Dear Randy: How Can I Search Your Blog to Find Reviews?

Reader Carole asked me this question in email recently.

There are really five ways to search this blog.

1)  Since it's a Blogger blog, there is a small search box in the upper left hand corner of the blog page (outlined in purple on the screen below):


I typed for "RootsMagic" in the search field, and a number of posts appeared on the results page.  For a keyword with many mentions, you will have to scroll through the blog posts (you could use the "Find" function on your computer browser to help), but Blogger provides only a limited number of posts on a given page. You can click on "Older posts" at the bottom of the page.

2)  There is a Google Search field on the upper right-hand side of the blog page (outlined in purple on the screen below):

If you put "RootsMagic" in that field, you would get a Genea-Musings page for posts with the word "RootsMagic."  You could click on the "Sort by date" to see the latest.

3)  A reader could use the "Site" feature on Google to search for posts with the keyword(s) - for example a search for site:www.geneamusings.com rootsmagic will find every post with the word "rootsmagic" in it.  All 2,650 of them.

4)  On the right-hand side of the blog, way down the blog page past the Blog Archive and Popular Posts is the "Labels" list.  I add labels to every blog post to help readers, and myself, find posts on topics of interest using Keywords.  Here is the Labels area for RootsMagic (outlined in purple on the screen below):


Blogger helpfully tells the reader the number of blog posts that have been labeled with the keyword.  For "RootsMagic" there are 278 blog posts in the over 10,000 Genea-Musings posts.

5)  The Labels also appear at the bottom of every post.  The screen below shows the labels for one of my blog posts about RootsMagic (outlined in purple):

A reader can click on the Keyword in the label and see the most recent blog posts with that Label on a new Genea-Musings page.

6)  Of course, the keyword, label and search features depend on the blogger using keywords and labels consistently and accurately.  

I hope this answered Carole's question!!!  Perhaps it will help readers of other Blogger pages also.

=============================================


Copyright (c) 2017, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

1 comment:

Carole said...

Thanks, Randy, I sure appreciate your help. Carole