[Pydotorg-redesign] how to search the site

[Roy Smith]

On Saturday, September 13, 2003, at 04:43  PM, Simon Willison wrote:

> Roy Smith wrote:
>> What does Lupy give us that google doesn't?
>
> Lupy gives us three big advantages:
>
> 1. Content is indexed as soon as it is added to the site. This is a 
> critical advantage over Google, which may only reindex once a week or 
> even once a month.

Is this really critical?  Only an extremely tiny fraction of the site 
changes month to month, and new stuff tends to be highlighted in some 
kind of 'what's new' section on most web sites anyway.

> 2. We can customise it (as Tim Parkin has already pointed out).

We can, but is it worth the trouble?

Also, as a tie-in to the marketing discussion, I think there may be a 
certain advantage to using google's stock service rather than something 
we customized.  Let's say I'm a dev manager, and one of my team leads 
is pitching using Python for our latest project.  I'm nervous about the 
idea, but agreed to at least think about it.  I go to the python web 
site to see what I can find there.  There is something comforting about 
seeing a "powered by google" search box on the home page.  It's 
familiar, it's got positive associations, and it's something I already 
know how to use.

> 3. It's written in Python! The official site for the Python 
> programming language should showcase Python whenever possible.

Of course we should. Google uses python.  They're even one of our 
"reference customers", as the marketing folks would say.

Whatever search engine we end up using, we should have a search box on 
every single page (in some standard place as part of the navigation 
tools).  It's so much more convenient than having to navigate you way 
to some special search page.