Boring Technical Post: The search that found nothing

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WARNING! What follows is a boring technical blog post. Every so often, I will be posting about the ongoing challenges of maintaining the Discovery Center website. If that sounds terrible to you, check out these awesome nature photos instead.

Still with me? Great!

If you have been to the main Discovery Center page in the past and tried to search for something specific, you probably weren’t  successful. The search on the website was, as they say in the world of website development, “not good”. If for some reason you had not memorized the title of the tutorial you were looking for, then you were out of luck.

No More!  I am very happy to say that is a thing of the past! This month we updated our search to use the power of Google. Now you can “Google” a topic and see the results using Google’s powerful search algorithm (video and written tutorials, tips, blog posts, etc.) from just the Discovery Center pages.

I know some people will be saying, “It’s about time, why did it take so long?” and that is a great question. I won’t bore you with the technical details but I will say that it has been a long journey to get to where we are today and we still have a long way to go. The development of the Discovery Center started with a big idea and a very small team. We have focused our efforts on the content and the basic functionality while we worked on a platform to bring it all together. With the basics in place, a slightly larger team, and lots of great content, we can now work on improving how the site functions. Search is just one of those steps.

I hope you stick around with us as we continue to make improvements to the site, it’s only going to get better!

BTW, if something isn’t working or you have a suggestion about something you would like to see on Discovery Center, please leave a comment below so that I can add it to our list.