Some days ago, a new version of MTLookup was released. Please read Second version of MTLookup released for the announcement. I will describe the new features in several posts, which will be published here in the Movable Type Weblog.

Today, I want to tell you about several small improvements.

Website Selection

With the first version of MTLookup, either all or a single website was searched. Today, there are more than 20 websites and you can select any combination of websites as the target of your query.

The websites can be selected one by one with the help of checkboxes. As the websites are grouped, you can also select one of three groups thus selecting several websites at the same time.

The websites can also be selected with the help of the search phrase. Each website has a unique key, which can be used together with the site-argument. For example,...

...searches for the two word combination "banner image", restricting to results from Elise's Learning Movable Type website. You can use several site-arguments...

...searching within any combination of websites. You can also use the special key "ALL"...

...for searching all websites. You can find a list of all keywords in MTLookup Help.

Categories

If a website is spidered, all articles are categorized automatically. One of the pre-defined categories...

• Tutorials
• Plugins
• Templates
• Manuals
• News
• Links
• Other

... is assigned.

For example, by selecting »Plugins« and entering an asterisk * as the search phrase, you will get a result list built from all plugin-related entries.

Paging

MTLookup knows more than 2000 articles. Thus the result list might become rather long. Because of this, it is not reasonable to always display all results.

A result list is shown in a paged display. After executing the query, only the first X results are shown. New links above the result list allow an easy navigation to any of the 10 first pages.

The page size can be configured. You choose whether 10, 20, 50 or 100 results are to be displayed.

Result Display

A result displays the following information...

• title
• summary consisting of: name of website, category, size in KB, and number of words
• excerpt

You can choose which information is to be displayed. Choose one of three modes.

• title
• title and summary
• title and summary and excerpt

So you can influence the amount of information that is displayed for each result.

Those websites, which publish a favicon, will have this favicon shown next to the excerpt. That way, it is easy for you to see where the article is from.

Related Articles

The new version of MTLookup is described on the Movable Type Weblog. These articles are...

• Second version of MTLookup released
• MTLookup v2 Improvements: Website Indexing
• MTLookup v2 Improvements: Stemming
• MTLookup v2 Improvements: Persistent User Data
• MTLookup v2 Improvements: Query Feedback
• MTLookup v2 Improvements: This and That

If you want to try, use MTLookup.

mgs | 09/23/2005

Feedback is welcome!

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