Based on the Gold Coast, Australia, we try very hard to wake up every morning. If we forget, havock reigns. When awake, we play all things website - design, build, fix, CMS (content management systems), email solutions, blah, blah, blah. We love WordPress websites the best. "Why" you ask..? Because that's a website that works for you, giving you freedom, flexability and a superior website solution.
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We like Sphinn - it’s a Digg-like, self-voting, social-proofing community. They run some great stories and you can really keep up with the latest Industry news and views.
But if you’re wanting to “search” their website for some specific info, be warned - their search really sucks.
It sucks for a few reasons:
- there are NO filtering options
- there are NO sorting options
- you cannot enter a long search query (like an article title) because the search times out with a “Fatal Error: maximum time exceeded” error
We only discovered this today while searching Sphinn for our article “Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard“, which has been submitted with that exact title. So when you know the exact title of an article, and you want to find it quickly, the title is an obvious search choice. Isn’t it..?
So I started shortening the search query to avoid the timing out issue. Here’s how short our queries went to return any results:
- Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard = “fatal error: timeout”
- Yoast, the SEO WordPress = “fatal error: timeout”
- Yoast, the SEO Word = “fatal error: timeout”
- Yoast, the SEO = diluted, irrelivant, unsortable, unfilterable search results. 30+ pages of them.
The problem is, by the time you’ve shortened your search enough to avoid timing out, your query is so weak that your search results are largely irrelivant. And because you cannot filter or sort, you’re left no option but to wade through hundreds of search results.
So we thought focusing on our primary keywords might make Sphinn search life easier. Guess again. Here’s our next attempt to find a single article that we know the title of and we know exists!
- Yoast SEO WordPress = “fatal error: timeout”
- Yoast SEO WordPress Wizard = “359 Pages of results”.
That’s 8975 articles..! And no where in the first 3 pages is our beloved “Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard” article.
This is all to hard.
We told you Sphinn search sucks.
Maybe there’s just some issue with the Sphinn search feature today..?
Maybe Google have spoilt us all..?
We’ve sent an email to Spinn Customer Support, so we’ll let you all know if there’s any reply.
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2 Comments so far
Okay, here are my 2 bobs worth as you say…
Its not only Sphinn, many website search functions fail at even the most simplest queries. I always use Google, Yahoo! or Live and search using different advanced queries based on what I want to find. So, in your above example, I might do something like this…
site:sphinn.com “Yoast, the SEO WordPress Wizard”
See how that works for you. You can also go into the Advanced Search features of Google and perform more in depth queries. It gets a bit tricky though.
Good luck with your search!
Hey pageoneresults.
Ironically, I was reading your “Story About Social Media Networking” just last night. Well I didn’t read the entire story, but it’s a really interesting case study (if anyone else wants to, you can view it here: http://www.seoconsultants.com/sphinn/expose/).
re: your comments - yes we can always rely on Google. It just surprises me that sites of Sphinn’s size and stature (where their readers ARE going to use their search function) don’t provide even reasonable search abilities.
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