Improved Article Searching
Over the past two years, there’s been a couple thousand posts published on FanGraphs. Searching the archive has been difficult to say the least. In comes Google Custom Search which in my opinion allows for a simple and effective way to search the FanGraphs archives.
On the homepage and in the blog sections you can now search for any topic you like, including players and hopefully you’ll be able to find what you were looking for much more easily than in the past.
I’m sure at some point we’ll come up with a great way to do a unified article/player search on the site, but until then, I think this will do the trick.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Unifying the searches could be more cumbersome, depending on how it’s handled. So much of the time I’m jumping in here just to look something up about a player really quickly… if unifying the article and player searches adds another step where you have to pick between listings (e.g. for player pages, articles, etc) instead of taking you directly to the player page you just searched for, I think I would prefer the two separate. Just my two cents.
Of course, if it was some kind of drop down box which defaults at “Search for players” and has an option underneath for “Search for articles”, that would be neat, though not necessarily much more efficient space-wise.
In any case, the article searching is a welcome addition, and something I’ve definitely felt was missing before. Nice work!
Good!
One issue, though. When I search for, say, “Auction Draft” I find a few articles with that in the title and then a bunch where an article with “Auction Draft” in the title was listed in the recently commented or recent stories WHEN the article was indexed by Google–but it isn’t there anymore.
I’m not sure how to keep that from happening.
Awesome. The other day I was hunting for a Brett Anderson article that was only a year old, and was having a hell of a time.
I, too, think there should be two different search boxes. One to take me to the stats pronto and one to take me to either a unified wad-of-goodness or just articles.
Minimize clicks and Maximize efficiency!
I take it all the various google tips and tricks work on this search?
“Brett Anderson”+Curveball+-“Taco Weight”
Thank you.
Thanks for this — it certainly cuts out some busywork doing the same thing through separate google searches.
Here’s an idea for “unifying” search in a way that shouldn’t be too complex: Place a link on each player page, perhaps immediately beneath the three articles you list for a player or, if that doesn’t work (and/or you don’t want to push the dashboard down further) perhaps up in the player name header line next to the “Add Player” button. The text for the link would be something like “More articles about ” or just “More articles”; the link would be a shortcut for doing the google site search you have now, but with the supplied player name included (and ideally ordered on date descending, ie most recent articles first). To display the results you could either re-use the expanding section you have on the front page right now, or (perhaps better) a wholly separate page.
This would make it easy to go from the player’s page to all articles about the player*, without having to backtrack to the front page and re-enter the player’s name. (Unless there’s some other way to achieve this that I’ve missed).
* Actually, it’s all articles in which the player is mentioned, which is less desirable (and the difference between brute search and a smarter tagging system), but good enough.
This is an awesome improvement. Thank you guys for adding it.
Thank you. now if only I could find my other Phillies’ sock…
So far, looks awesome. Just search “BIS defensive stats” and the article I wanted was found.
You might want to look into getting the punctuation marks “+/-” searchable. Unsurprisingly, it’s not searchable, because it’s not even close to English. (Note “plus-minus” works great.)
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