Bruce Eitman

This weekend I received an email from one of my blog’s readers asking my how to search for content on my blog. To be honest, my first reaction was to wonder why someone would ask me such a silly question. But then I thought on it and realize that I didn’t know the answer, but I was pretty sure that Google could do it. For the few of you that watched the video that Microsoft produced where I answered some questions that were asked of me off camera, I said that the most important tools that a Platform Builder developer needs are good search tools.   So let’s look at some:

Most of you are currently using Google. I know that because I can see how you found my blog if you click on a link to one of my pages.   In the last week Google has represented about 98% of the search engines used by you. So you are familiar with the Google home page:

But

have you noticed the text next to the search box? One of the choices is Advanced Search:

Clicking on Advanced Search links to a page that allows you to narrow down your search results, like to view results only from my blog.

Last

week one of my readers noticed that I referred to the _FLATRELEASEDIR and asked what the _FLATRELEASEDIR is. So let’s use the Advance Search on Google to see if we can find more information about the _FLATRELEASEDIR. Start by entering _FLATRELEASEDIR in the Find web pages that have... all of these words text field. If you were to search now you would find thousands of pages, but of course you really want to know what I have to say about the _FLATRELEASEDIR, so enter geekswithblogs.net/bruceeitman in the Search within a site or domain  box:

Now we have results from my blog showing the 18 pages (not counting this one) that have references to the _FLATRELEASEDIR:

<results.jpg>

If you are going to do much with Platform Builder, then you should have a good tool for searching all of the source code available within the build tree. There is just too much information available in the source code to not be able to find it with ease. If you have looked at Profile: Software Development Tools then you already know that my software engineering roots include UNIX, where I learned to use grep to get answers. Grep is a powerful tool, but the results can be cumbersome, so I now use Examine32 which works like grep, but has a simple GUI to aid in creating the search and using the results. I am not necessarily promoting Examine32, I don’t have any ties to it, but I am promoting owning and using good search tools.