01 December, 2008

ArchiCAD Searches

you can have additional searches in FirefoxVery often, the results thrown up by the archicad-talk forum's built-in search are inadequate or just plain off the mark. Seeing this thread got me thinking that if Google is doing a better job of indexing and parsing results from the forum then maybe the searches I've added to the Firefox interface with the Add to Search Bar extension are not as effective as I'd like them to be.

Of course we can always add the site:whatever.com command to the query but it's cumbersome and I almost never remember to use it. Besides if you want to search more than one site, it's pretty much useless. In other words, lazy folks like myself need easy-to-use, ready-made, dedicated, archicad search engines and that's exactly what we have here.

Try them out on the left side of this page. The first box searches the forum and the second... heck, you can read that for yourself. If there are other sources of knowledge that are useful, please hit the comments. Oh, and:
IF browser = "firefox" THEN
use Add to Search Bar extension
ELSE
bookmark this page
ENDIF
Sorry, couldn't resist. ;) Hope this helps someone other than myself.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! Is there any way to write you in private?

Vistasp Mehta said...

Yes.

http://www.btsquarepeg.com/contact/

Anonymous said...

Hi!
You know www.archicadobjects.com ?

Vistasp Mehta said...

Yes, I do know about archicadobjects and I registered a long time ago. Unfortunately, I can't download anything until I make sufficient posts on the forum - and I cannot post on the forum because I don't speak Italian. [sigh]

Jared said...

I'd love it if you'd add www.shoegnome.com to the searchable sites. Also sadly some of the sites you search are no longer up. (like tr.graphisoftus.com and archicad.ca)

Vistasp Mehta said...

Done! Thanks for reminding me about tr.graphisoftus & archicad.ca Jared. I had intended removing them but never actually got beyond the intention. ;)

ila said...

Hi!
Is't possible to add the www.archicad.lap.hu to the searchable sites?
Best Regads,
Ila

Vistasp Mehta said...

Done Ila.

Anonymous said...

Hi...you might consider adding objectsonline.com, one of the largest ArchiCAD content collections on the web.

Vistasp Mehta said...

I'm not sure... Objects Online is for, well, objects and I'm trying to include sites that have some kind of AC knowledge base. However, I'm willing to listen if users think otherwise.

Kack said...

bimstop.com
architruques.blogspot.com

Vistasp Mehta said...

Thanks for the suggestions Kack.

Miguel Krippahl's blog is a good knowledge base: I don't know if the Portuguese keywords will show up properly in an English language search but am willing to try it out.

If it works well, there are numerous blogs - mostly in other European languages - that could get added. Maybe we can have an option that includes results from non-English language sites.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, sites like bimstop (or the recently launched bimobject) are exclusively about objects - and not always AC objects either - so we could get inaccurate results.