Customized search box and live search macro
February 11th, 2007
Windows live search macros enable you to build your own customized search engines. You could share your macros in the public directories or put it on your own websites or blogs as a search box. For example, if you have multiple websites, including 2 technical blogs, 1 personal blog, 2 bookmarking feeds, and so on, you could build a federated search engine that covers all your sites and feeds. Put it on your personal website or blog so that your readers and fans can search just within all your sites and feeds. Isn’t that cool? You could also build your search engines to cover your favorite entertainment websites or technical reference sites, so on and so forth.
Here is an example how I created mine (which you could see on the right side bar of my blog), go to http://search.live.com/macros, click “Get started”, Choose “Advanced”, then type in the following macro. Replace the following sample URLs with your own, otherwise you are sending traffic to me 
|
(
site:stanblog.jojoyao.com OR
site:stanyrocks.spaces.live.com OR
site:clipmarks.com/clipper/stanyao/
)
OR
(
link:stanblog.jojoyao.com OR
link:stanyrocks.spaces.live.com
)
|
The above macro searches all your sites and other sites that link to yours (find out what others are discussing about your sites). Test search some keywords and verify your code. Then you could name (we will use later) and save this macro. Then go to http://search.live.com/siteowner?mkt=en-us, click “Advanced Search Box – Get Started”, uncheck “Site search”, check “Search macro”, type in the name of the macro we did above and a more descriptive display name, and we are about done. After clicking “Next” you will see the search box code that you could add to your site.
