My first SearchMonkey application has been approved and is ready for anyone to use!
When searching for for PHP functions, it will immediately show you the syntax so you don’t need to click through to the the actual page.
A few thoughts on SearchMonkey:
- It’s a very cool concept and I hope it takes off
- I wish it actually replaced the contents of the search result abstract with my app, like it shows in the demos instead of showing something additional I have to click.
- Building them requires quite a bit of technical background. You need to understand RDF, XSLT and some PHP and understand how they all work together.
- Adding an application requires too many non-obvious steps.
- The tool itself shows some nice previews, but it’s clunky and requires a lot of clicks. I wish there was something I could use to edit and test outside the developer tool for faster iteration.
- The preview pane is really nice, but too slow to update
- You can’t specify URL patterns that don’t end in slashes.
- It seems to hide long lines for some reason, but they show properly in a tooltip.
The team has been very repsonsive though and is making changes quickly, so I’m sure they’ll fix these nits and a lot more soon.
Go SearchMonkey!
This is pretty sweet, thanks for building it. Would you mind tweaking it to be *.php.net? I usually use domain:php.net in my searches, and sometimes I prefer docs.php.net to the main PHP site’s documentation.
It’s already set to use *.php.net.