Frequently Asked Search Questions

  1. Why did you change the way search works?
    Originally when you performed a search you could only specify a keyword. All entries on our site would then have their descriptions searched to see if this keyword existed. We try to give a nice description of the content, assign it to the right category and associate it with the relevant tags and this makes it a very nice browsing experience, but not a good experience when it comes to search. When you are searching for something you may have single or multiple keywords, you might wish to search everything or only a single category and most importantly of all you want the search to be performed against the actual content and not the description of the content (to ensure you return all relevant results). This is why we changed the way search works. We believe in having a good browsing experience (when you are looking for new content with nothing in particular in mind) and a great search experience (when you need an answer or help and you know what you are looking for).
  2. Why Google Custom Search?
    Although it did mean the introduction of Google Adwords, Google Custom Search gives us a lot of flexibility and reduces the load on our own servers (for indexing and searching through the content). We have also considered other search engines such as Bing and an internal search engine but for now Google Custom Search provides the best fit.
  3. Why are only 8 results returned per page on the search page and 10 results everywhere else?
    Google Custom Search only returns 8 results per page. We could change the other pages so that they too showed 8 results per page but for now we prefer to stick with the default of 10.
  4. Why are a maximum of 7 pages returned?
    Google Custom Search allows you to return a maximum of 64 results. After that the search (if there are more results and you wish to continue) results need to be displayed on Google's website.
  5. Why do you only index the hompage of sites listed in the Websites category?
    Websites can contain a lot of content (and sometimes not all of it is related to monotouch or iPhone development). By limiting it to the homepage a search may still bring up an interesting site but it cuts down the amount of non-applicable content that gets searched. The exception to this is the monotouch.net website, the monotouch wiki and sources related to questions (the monotouch mailing list, forums and stackoverflow.com).
  6. Why did you include stackoverflow.com, a lot of times the content returned can be about Objective-C?
    StackOverflow is a really good site with useful content that covers many libraries and development languages. While developing an iPhone app you may come need an answer to an iPhone SDK question that was answered by an Objective-C developer or a C# related question that happens to have been answered by someone doing something completely different.
  7. Why have you used shortcut keys e.g. a=articles b=books s=samples for search filtering instead of including radio buttons or a drop-down list?
    We want people to be able to easily search monotouch related content through our site as well as through search boxes integrated into their browser. By using a shortcut key you can filter out the results from within Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer etc before hitting our results page. We've also found the use of shortcut keys to be quite a good experience once you get used to them (e.g. RT, D etc on Twitter).
  8. Where can I find out more?
    We have a blog post about the new search features and how you can easily integrate the search engine into your browser. Please visit MonoTouch.Info with a pinch of search for more information.