Jeromy Anglim's Notes

This post describes how to perform full text search on a tumblr blog using Google Reader.

Background

By default Tumblr search only works on tags. I write a lot of stuff on my Tumblr blog and I want to be able to search all the content. At least at the time of posting not all my content is indexed by Google, so searches of the form foo inurl:jeromyanglim.tumblr.com are incomplete. Thus, I stumbled on a solution using Google Reader.

Implementing Full text search in Google Reader

1. Add the RSS feed of the blog to Google Reader (if you’ve never worked with RSS, watch this
2. Search the blog in Google Reader. By default, the search will also search all your other feeds. So to limit results to just the particular feed, include the feed’s name in quotes. It may be useful to give the feed a unique name so that it is easier to filter in search. Alternatively you can filter by a particular RSS feed or a category of feeds. For example, I have a special category called ‘search’ which includes all the blogs that I might want to search over.

Extending with Alfred custom search

To make searching even eaiser I incorporated a custom search into Alfred (a search tool for OSX, which described here). The same approach could be applied to a wide range of other quick search tools.

In summary, I performed a search for keywords and my blog name in Google Reader and copied the resulting URL. The keyword part was replaced with {query} as shown below:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=qq#search/{query}%20%22jeromy%20anglim%27s%20notes%22/

1. In Alfred I went to preferences - custom searches +.
2. Search URL was defined as the URL above
3. I called the keyword notes

Now I can activate Alfred and type notes whatever and it will search my blog on Google reader for whatever.