How do I create a search feature for my website that searches only the meta tags of my pages
June 25, 2010 2:37 PM

How do I create a search feature for my website that searches only the meta tags of my pages and displays a list of pages where the search terms appear in the meta tags? In other words, how do I make my site searchable by tag?
posted by markcmyers to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
What platform is your site running on? Are you using a canned CMS like WordPress? Is this an Apache/PHP/MySQL environment, or IIS/ASP.net/MSSQL? Something else? Do you have admin access to the server or are you restricted to a sandbox? (If the latter, you should contact your hosting company and they can help you.)
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 2:40 PM on June 25, 2010


Google does not use meta tag elements or the HTML keyword for indexing. While there is a handy allintitle operator, no published allinmeta-like feature exists. Bing doesn't, either, that I could find. So, I think you'd be down to running your own crawler.
posted by adipocere at 2:43 PM on June 25, 2010


This is a plain vanilla hosted website, nothing special, not Wordpress or CMS. I guess what I'm asking is, are there scripts for running your own crawler?
posted by markcmyers at 2:48 PM on June 25, 2010


You can't just run "scripts" without first knowing what scripting languages are supported by your web host. A PHP script won't run on a ColdFusion server, for example. You really need to contact your web host directly, or else peruse their server-side scripting documentation and find a tutorial or two on the whatever they support. Nobody here is going to be much help without knowing more information about the server setup.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:06 PM on June 25, 2010


More to the point, there are probably scripts that will do what you want, but there's no way to find them without some additional info about your web host.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:07 PM on June 25, 2010


I haven't chosen a host yet, but it won't be anything special—just a standard linux setup that offers PHP and mySQL.
posted by markcmyers at 3:22 PM on June 25, 2010


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