Two new search widgets for your blogger blogs

Here are two new search widgets for your Blogger blogs:

• A posts/label search widget, which can be used to limit results and be styled to match your blog template (from Dig 'n' Share Blog)


• A multiple blog search widget, to search posts, Google Blog search and Technorati (currently being developed by myself)

Here follows an explanation of the uses for both search widgets, with the link for David's blog search, and the widget code for my "multiple" search widget.

Dig 'n' Share Blog Search Widget

David of Dig 'n' Share emailed me with the details of this new blog search widget yesterday. It works by using two search forms to search either posts or labels for the given search text, and can limit the results which are displayed in the page so you don't end up with a huge page full of search results!

This widget is particularly advantageous for blogs which use a lot of labels as "tags" for posts (indeed, Blogger labels are classed as "tags" by Google, Technorati, Del.icio.us and the like), and with a few minor adjustments I'm sure David will soon be able to offer this widget in one click install format, so you can instantly add this to your blog.

For full details and to get the code for this search widget, please head over to Dig 'n' Share.

Multiple Blog Search Widget

Inspired by David's new widget, I sought to create another blog search widget which could also fetch results from Google and Technorati blog search engines. After much trial and error, I finally created this blog search widget, which allows you to choose between the four different search formats using a radio button:

Search Blogger Buster

Search this blog

Google Blog Search

Technorati

For:

Try this out if you like!

This search form uses options offered by the radio buttons to decide on the location of the search (ie: blog posts, Google Blogsearch or Technorati) and is controlled by a simple javascript inside the widget itself. It is very simple to install, and works immediately upon installation since it requires no further customization to work on any blogger blog.

To use this widget in your own blog, sinply copy the following code and paste into an HTML/Javascript widget in your blog layout. If you use a classic Blogger template, you can simply paste this code in your template's HTML where you would like it to appear:

I do plan to make some improvements to this widget in the near future, including a widget installer, which I will post about soon.

I hope you like these new search widgets! Please let me know your comments and opinions below.

Technorati Tags: search | widget | blogger | google+blogsearch | technorati | forms