We’ve been stealthily working on a new project, which is now online in beta form at www.SearchScripting.com. It’s essentially a search engine focused entirely on scripting topics; right now, we’ve loaded it with hand-selected sites related to Windows administrative scripting. We’ve built it to support other scripting technologies, but want to get some feedback on folks who are using it so we can fine-tune stuff before we go wild with the content we’re crawling. Our theory with this site is that mainstream sites (Google, MSN, and what-have-you) make it tough to get really specific search results for scripting, because you get a lot of “noise” results. We’ve had our engine crawl only hand-selected sites that contain scripts, tutorials, reference materials, and so forth, and implemented a query language that allows you to be VERY specific about what you’re looking for. The system then provides ranked results, tells you what site each result came from, what type of site that is (a blog, reference, etc), and even (like Google) lets you view cached pages in case the original isn’t available.
It’s our hope that, with user feedback and actual field use, this will become a much better way to search for specific sample scripts, specific reference materials, and so forth. Because the sites crawled by the engine are hand-selected, we’re excluding commercial sites (yes, even our own) to ensure that the results are focused on scripts, tutorials, references, and other information-dense pages. The site itself includes a full list of sites we’re crawling, and information on our selection criteria, so that everyone’s clear on what’s included and why.
We hope you’ll give it a shot, and let us know what you think.
