Monday, February 09, 2009

Dear Stephen Taylor: I can haz search box?


All right, Stephen, now I'm just plain begging: Can you please, pretty please with sugar on top, give me back that hilariously entertaining Blogging Tories search box that, for so many months, was the source of such endless mirth and merriment here at CC HQ? Really, I'm not sure it was physically possible to be more amusing than to pop over to the BT aggregator search feature, drop in the phrase of the day, and watch the hysterically embarrassing results come pouring forth.

These days, the entertainment comes from the (conveniently dumped on a Friday afternoon) news that the Cons were dropping the Chuck Cadman lawsuit -- something you wouldn't know even happened if you depended on the Blogging Tories to stay cripplingly ignorant and misinformed up on current events.

No, no, don't take my word for it -- see for yourself. Really, start on the main page and search for the string "Cadman." Then go to the second page. And the third. And the fourth. And the ... well, you see the pattern here, right? And save for a single reference (which doesn't really count as you can see), there is no mention of the Cadman fiasco. None. Squat. Zip. Nada. Which is where that BT search box would have come in so delightfully handy, being able to track down the monumental shrieking and howling and gloating from a few months back when the Cons launched that lawsuit, and being able to compare it with the eerie, embarrassing ("Oh, look, bright shiny thing!") deathly silence after it quietly went away.

So, please, Stephen? For the sake of democracy. For the sake of transparency and accountability. And, mostly, for the sake of me being able to make my readers laugh so hard they wet themselves, can we have that search box back? Don't do it for posterity -- do it for me. Because, frankly, I don't give a fuck about posterity, but I like to entertain my readers. And, in the end, that's all that really counts, right?

AFTERSNARK: Yes, I can be self-serving on occasion. So sue me. Um, wait ... let me rephrase that ...

BONUS SNARK AT NO EXTRA CHARGE: I am moderately amused by the fact that Stephen Taylor himself has no search feature on his own blog. Really, go see for yourself.

Apparently, depending on what floats your boat, you're free to learn all about Stephen's bio, or his photos, or his videos, or his Twitter, or his Facebook page, or his RSS feed, and a whack of other stuff. But, try as I might, I can't find a simple search feature. One wonders why Stephen is so weirdly embarrassed by his blog entries that he makes it as hard as possible for someone to poke around there.

Then again, if I was so hilariously wrong or irrelevant so much of the time, I'd probably remove the search feature from my blog as well.

6 comments:

thwap said...

I was never able to find their search engine. Maybe I blinked and missed it?

Stephen Taylor would be a perfect inner party manager in Orwell's "Ministry of Truth" in 1984.

agsharma said...

This may work - on the google search box, type :

cadman site:www.bloggingtories.ca

replace cadman with what you are searchign for and you can continue mining bloggingtories.ca.

Hope this helps!!

from desiintoronto.com

MacD said...

Listen leftards:

"If you include site: in your query, Google will restrict your search results to the site or domain you specify. For example, [ admissions site:www.lse.ac.uk ] will show admissions information from London School of Economics’ site and [ peace site:gov ] will find pages about peace within the .gov domain. You can specify a domain with or without a period, e.g., either as .gov or gov."

CC said...

Why, thank you so much for your wisdom, MacD; now let me explain why you're a total douchebag.

When that BT search feature existed, it did not simply search the content at the BT site proper.

Rather, it would (based on every indication it gave me) recursively crawl through all of the BT member sites as well, which is exactly what I was after and is (as far as I can tell) not what your little recipe will do for me.

So thanks for showing up, MacD. Now piss off, and take the attitude with you. There's a good little wingnut.

Ti-Guy said...

I've still not decided what the case is here or which is worse: that Stephen Taylor has to impose message discipline on his Blogging Co-Whories or that they gag themselves instinctively.

I'm guessing the latter and I suspect that's worse, especially for a "movement" that claims superiority in terms of freedom of expression and independent thought.

mikmik said...

Another example of tory transparency.
Freedom of information.

tory says: What information?