Why I’m Glad Google Isn’t Laser-Accurate

Search engines, especially Google, are always striving to give searchers exactly what they want. That’s admirable from one point of view, but from another, it’s not always super-helpful.

As Modest Opinions is still young and I’m always looking for ways to improve the experience for everyone, I used Google to look for a Wordpress plugin that would put a "quote of the day" on the site. Oh, don’t worry, I won’t bore you to death with old Mark Twain witticisms or the latest from Ben Franklin. No, I want a plugin that will allow me to specify what quote will be displayed on each day. I decided I wanted this because I wanted simply to write "I won’t be reviewing that spider movie because they don’t need my help advertising their billion-dollar flick", and I don’t think that one line deserved its own blog entry.

Google didn’t turn up a plugin for me, but it did turn up another - a plugin that will display the full content of each article within my feed. Cutting off the feed contents when a "more tag" is used is a "feature" that Wordpress introduced, and not only is it not helpful, it’s downright unhelpful. I had asked Maria, co-author of the Wordpress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide about it, but she wasn’t sure of the solution. Well, this plugin I found does the trick. It allows me to keep my start page nice and easy to browse while giving my feed subscribers what they want - the full contents without the need to open the full page in an extra step.

If Google was laser-accurate, it would have found the original plugin I was looking for or else it would have displayed a "can’t find it, sorry" message. As it is, the search results return pages that aren’t exactly what you’re looking for, but might just be close enough. I like that.

Tags:wordpress,plugin,feed,quotes

May 14, 2007 | Filed Under Site Management

Comments

3 Responses to “Why I’m Glad Google Isn’t Laser-Accurate”

Maria on May 14th, 2007 9:31 am

This is odd on several levels.

First of all, I wanted to do exactly the opposite of what you want to do with MORE and feeds. I wanted full text available on my site but only text before the MORE on my feeds. My goal was to put short articles in my feed in their entirety but require feed readers to come to the site and read long articles there. This was partially because of Feedburner’s total feed size restraints, which are generous unless you’re as wordy as I am and to encourage feed readers to visit the site at least once in a while.

I was having a problem with your request to do the opposite because during my research, that’s what WordPress already did. What I failed to realize is that I had researched WordPress 2.0.x and you were talking about WordPress 2.1.x. Because I’ve only upgraded on one site and I didn’t do my experiments on that site, I didn’t realize the WordPress folks had changed the behavior of this feature to work exactly they way I want it — but not at all the way you want it.

I’m glad you found the answer to your question!

I also want to mention that I’ve also found different plugins when using Google for searching. Looking for one thing I want, finding another that I either wanted and knew I wanted or wanted and didn’t know I wanted.
Daniel on May 14th, 2007 10:57 am

Sorry, Maria, looks like I wasn’t accurate enough in my question — and I didn’t realize 2.0 and 2.1 were different in this regard! Thanks for mentioning that… I’ll be sure to double-check for that whenever I have a plugin problem or a feature issue like this one.
Maria on May 14th, 2007 11:24 am

Actually, I should have realized it, too!

But now that 2.1 is out (and I think 2.2 might be out soon) it’s important to make sure that your plugins are compatible BEFORE upgrading. (I wrote a blog post about that, too.) That’s what’s holding me back from upgrading my main blog. It’s going to take most of a day and I’m just too lazy right now to do it.