Better to use Google for search

Profile picture for user Precaud
Precaud on 7 Sep 2025 at 07:08

This morning I was looking for a post I remember reading last year. In it is a search target that is fairly short and pretty unique. So I entered it in the search box at the top of the page. It returned zero results.

Normally I would just accept that and move on. But I know for a fact that the desired posts exist. So I went to Google Advanced Search, entered the search target in the search box, and put "thefreshloaf.com" in the 'Site or Domain" box. It returned three results, one of which was the post I was looking for.

I don't know what database the site's search uses, but it appears to be an incomplete one.

I have found the same thing. I wouldn't call the TFL search function "incomplete".  It's just that doing search well is difficult.  It's possible to arrange to have Google provide the search function for a site.  I don't know how to set that up nor how much  it costs. 

Running an internet search is useful even if you start out searching with TFL's search box.  On Google search, you don't need to go to Advanced Search, you can just add "site:thefreshloaf.com" like this:

score baguette site:thefreshloaf.com

This works for at some other common search engines too, including DuckDuckGo and StartPage.

TomP

Profile picture for user Moe C

Moe C on 7 Sep 2025 at 07:45

 I often press something on my phone that wipes out the page I was reading. The subject of sourdough doughonuts has been active here. I followed a link to another doughnut thread and then accidently erased it. AI not only easily found the thread, it told me just about everything in it.

A big pet peeve I have is that none of the search engines have a sort by date option. I know Google has date ranges that can be used to limit the search, but the results can't be sorted in chronological order, either oldest or newest first.

Yeah, I've often wanted that as well. Odd that none of 'em offer it, it's so basic. Heck, search subroutines I wrote in the 1980's for use on internal databases offered it as an output option...

On Google, you can restrict a search to a certain date range like this:

semantic pipelines after:2023-01-01 before:2023-12-31 site:example.com

The results are still sorted by relevance, not date. You have to go the the Advanced GUI page to do more.

Profile picture for user albacore

albacore on 7 Sep 2025 at 14:51

What you need is the Google programmable search engine. This link should get you there:

https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/controlpanel/create

You may need to sign in to Google. Then set up the search engine using "thefreshloaf.com", then save it as a bookmark.

Fire it up when you want to use it and enter your search term. When you get the results list you will be able to list by relevance or date - and, joy of joy, results pagination is back too! (I hate the never ending scroll list).

Lance

If you right click in the URL bar you can select "Manage search engines and site search". Take the link you get from the programmable search engine and add q=%s like this:

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=437adad2331944769#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=%s&gsc.sort=date

I named mine tfl so I can jump to the URL bar and type

tfl barley

and hit enter. Boom a page of entries including barley sorted by date.

Gary

 

I set up the search on Google, but when I searched for "bauernbrot", the search did not return the post from today, some of the results were from the general Artisan Baking forum, and some of the other results were seemingly out of chronological order. 

Did I set it up wrong, or is that to be expected?

tfl
hit the spacebar and it replaced it with 
Search The Fresh Loaf

then I typed bauernbrot and hit enter