As you may have noticed, we’ve recently upgraded to “indesignsecrets 2.1” around here — a “dot release” with a few great (we think) improvements. For example, the “Recent Posts” section on the home page is now much easier to read and understand. There is a real archives page that shows all previous posts. You may notice that the “Recent Posts From…” section on the home page changes each time you visit, reminding you to look at some older posts by our excellent contributors.
But one of the most important changes is the implementation of our new search engine. We heard from you, our readers, that it was just too hard to find the blog posts you need. So we decided to take a radical step and just use a new Google Custom Search Engine. Now, when you use the Search field in the upper-right corner of any page, you can use any of google’s search features. For example:
- Type + (plus sign) before a word to say that word must be on the page
- Type – (hyphen) before a word to say that the word cannot be on the page
- Type quotes (” “) around two or more words to look for that exact phrase
- Type intitle: before a word to find a post with that word in its title (such as “intitle:cs4”)
When you press Enter (or click the little search button), you’ll be taken to a Google.com page for the results. Perhaps someday we’ll figure out how to make that page a bit prettier, but in the meantime… well, at least its fast and efficient.
Adding the IDSE to Your Google Home Page
If you use Google as your home (“portal”) page, you can add the InDesignSecrets search engine there, too. Just go to this link at google, then click on the +Google button that appears after where it says, “Add this search engine to your Google homepage.”
Not Done Yet!
There are hundreds of great tips (perhaps thousands, especially when you include the great feedback from our readers) at indesignsecrets.com. Our goal is to get that information to you as easily and quickly as possible. So we’ll keep working on the search engine situation. We may not use google forever, but for now, it seems to be a good solution.
Let us know what you think!
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on October 6, 2008
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