Hey Everyone,

So the product list seemed popular with a small subset of folks, so I'm back with another offering that some might find useful. It's a Google CSE (that stands for "Custom Search Engine") designed to return results from the Shadowrun-related sites I find myself referencing the most often. It also has a few search refinement options that allow you to narrow the results (including one that targets Dumpshock specifically; that was important to me, since searching Dumpshock in general is akin to black magic unless your Google-Fu is strong).

I'm terrible at naming things in general, and since La Femme Nikita already cornered the market on "Shadownet," I've landed on the descriptive but rather uninspired "Shadowsearch" instead. Whatever, as long as it works, right?

It seems to do the job relatively well. It's not really intended to be a substitute for those times when caffeine, eight hours, the entire WWW, and a list of search operators are called for, but rather to be a helpful tool for quick research.

The only problem I've noticed is that the inclusion of the more general RPG forums tends to be skewing the autocomplete suggestions, but the only way to mitigate that is either to 1) turn of autocomplete, or 2) remove those sites from the CSE. Silly suggestions seem preferable to those two options.

Any feedback is appreciated. Have fun.

Will definitely try it out. Thanks.

awesome~! how many hits/uses has it gotten so far? if you can tell

If the basic analytics that Google provides are to be believed, it has gotten very little use. I'm not sure if there's a delay in the data or it's just not being used.

It's not going to thrill me or kill me either way; it's still enables me to do research more easily for a couple of projects, which is why I built it in the first place.

Still, I hope it takes off, if only because it makes it that much easier to search the years and years of Dumpshock posts. Personally I think there's quite a bit of value in being able to retrieve a lot of those discussions and debates. A lot of the people who've worked on Shadowrun in various capacities posted their thoughts and ideas here, and have since moved on. Being able to delve into the recesses of Dumpshock is more or less required for people who have recently discovered the game and want to understand the history of it. I really didn't want that to be lost.

Pretty neat

Thanks

i'll definitely use it thanks chumm3r!

I like the idea...is there a way to make it search only DSF?

EDIT: Ah hah, found it.

Here is the search I have been waiting for all my life: https://www.google.com/cse?cx=0014211023126...k&gsc.sort=

Just to clarify for the folks who might still be figuring it out, clicking on any of the search refinements at the top of the page...AFTER you do the initial search....will narrow the results to only those contained in that refinement. Since this particular version was made with the Dumpshock crowd in mind, the "Dumpshock" refinement will return results only from dumpshock.com (which 99% of the time will be from forums.dumpshock.com, but occasionally you might pick up something from either the main site or a different subdomain).

If you're not sure which sites belong to which refinements, there's a list on the main page.

Hope that helps.

ps. If it seems to run slow or gives you an error, just try again. I'm basically pseudo-hosting this out of Dropbox, so occasionally it hiccups. In testing, it always seemed to be fine again after a couple of seconds.

Think you can add the Gaming Den and /r/Shadowrun

Ancient History and Frank Trollman occasionally have interesting SR discussions on the Gaming Den.

While /r/Shadowrun has a recurring post discussing the SR timeline.

The Gaming Den was already listed. Again, the list of sites and the refinements they belong to are on the initial search page.

I'll add the reddit thread later today.

Excellent. Once again, posting this to G+ so it gets some exposure (I hope). Oh yeah, I'll probably use it too.