Cruise Bruise Blog
March 3, 2009
March 3, 2009
Search Engine Feature Added To Cruise Bruise Makes For Quick Research
With over 1,600 pages of incidents and videos on Cruise Bruise, the requests are beginning to flood in for information on specific cases. The site map just isn't doing it for visitors, as they find themselves lost in the heaps of cases piled a mile high.
Recently, I began thinking about finding a way to sort through the cases quicker and easier. A search engine application seemed like the answer. But, the thought of incorporating something like that into Cruise Bruise seemed like a monumental task, one I was not up to.
Then came Cruise Ship Bay. Cruise Ship Bay is a search engine for the cruise industry. Everything in that engine is related to cruises, taking them, navigational charts, weather reports, port information, avoiding them, crime cases, legal advice and cruise deals. There are government pages that focus on various aspects of the cruise industry, both in the U.S. and around the world, such as the CDC and WHO.
What is missing from that search engine is the fluff. All those blog pages that use the word 'cruise' once, when talking about Tom Cruise, and somehow managed to rank for whatever it was you were searching for.
Gone are the media sites that charge for the information you are looking for, or deleted the page before you got a chance to read it. This is a meat and potatoes search engine for the cruise industry in the widest yet most defined sense possible, that is sure to grow as the most relevant pages and sites find their way into the data base.
By adding Cruise Bruise to the data base, I have been able to offer my visitors an easy way to search for anything cruise related, whether on my site or another.
Of course, some of you already know that. The regulars have already come in, notice something new, and began searching the Cruise Bruise site through Cruise Ship Bay.
This new feature is not going to be without glitches. Some pages in Cruise Bruise are going to take a while to get updated in the engine, and newer pages may be there before some older pages.
In the sample search above, I searched for "fire on a cruise", a typical topic our visitors might look for. In the screenshot above, you see the top three search results. There are hundreds of search results for this topic.
If you want to see only those that are archived on the Cruise Bruise site, you would click on the link 'Cruise Bruise', seen circled in red above. This will resort the results and give you only cases on Cruise Bruise related to cruise ship fires.
To use the search application, you can click on the Search Cruise Bruise button at the top of any page on Cruise Bruise. See the button circled in red below.
Over the coming months, I will be adding an actual search box to the top left side of every page on Cruise Bruise, to make that option more visible and make it easier for you to search, cutting out one step along the way.
When I have the search box on every page, the button link at the top of the pages will be replaced to point to a specific area of the site. But, for now, while I get those search boxes on every page, the button link to the search engine, is at least on every page, easy to find, and quick to use. Just don't get too used to it. If you see the search box on the page, use it because this is where we are headed.
You can see the search box now at the top left of this page.
As a Cruise Ship Bay partner, the application allows you the visitor to search for a specific term and look for it just within Cruise Bruise if you want.
For example, if you wanted to search for cases that involved a "fire on a cruise", you would enter that term into the search engine box in the upper left side of the Cruise Ship Bay search page. (or on Cruise Bruise)
In the image to the left, you can see I have done exactly that. Then, click the search button. What you will get are results as follows.
