I am making a wiki for “lore” for a character that me and my friend are making for fun and it would be nice to have a search bar on the website, so I was looking into Google Programmable Search, however the one page I have so far doesn’t appear when I search for it. I’m not very good with websites (basic HTML, CSS and JS knowledge) so I’m not sure if it’s on Google’s end, the website itself (tristan.rf.gd), or on InfinityFree’s end. If someone could help me that would be nice! Thank you
Thanks. Didn’t realize Google’s programmable search is just a normal google search; I thought whenever you set it to only search on your website, it searched the pages on your website not what Google has indexed. Google’s crawler gets a “soft 404” when it tries to crawl the base tristan.rf.gd website for some reason even though other people can view it just fine, so I can’t request an indexing of the entirety of my website until I figure out why Google’s crawler can’t see access it (I don’t have a robots.txt or anything that would be stopping Google). Are there any other search bars I could easily add until I can get the programmable google search working? I’m not using Wordpress or anything.
try searching for site: tristan.rf.gd on Google. I just did and there are no results so you have to register your site here: https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console
And then if there is any meaningful content, within 2-4 days it will be visible on Google by searching site: tristan.rf.gd. Hope it helped.
I highly recommend adding an SSL certificate to your site and secondly if you need help implementing search feature for your site, there are tutorials available and I can help too.
If there HAS to be “meaningful” content, then there is absolutely no way it’s being put on google because like I said it’s just a bunch of lore for characters me and my friend made, and nobody else cares about it. So I’ll need to find another search bar. I’ll try to find a tutorial for one, or a premade one on GitHub. If I can’t find one or I did find one then I’ll come back here.
It isn’t that when I search about `Atlantis, out of all the articles from well-known sites, your shows up. It doesn’t work like that. There is an entire field on it called Search Engine Optimizations (SEO). The only way for us to see your site on Google is to look for it specifically by name. For your website to show up when someone casually searches about your character, it has to be famous.
But since it doesn’t even show when you search for it by name indicates:
Google doesn’t know about it
You do not have a Search Console account
Oh and for the search bar part, remember backend is crucial for a proper search bar to work.
This is a search bar I had made for my website:
Okay, so basically, it doesn’t matter that the content isn’t actually meaningful to other people, I can still get it indexed on google? If that’s the case, then how would I go about getting every page as I create them indexed onto google so that the programmable search bar from google actually works? i know sitemaps exist, but I don’t know how to make them nor if they’re actually what I’d need. Or would I need to get them indexed manually every time I make a page?
To do so first let Google know your site exists. For this:
Go to link above.
Follow the steps to add your site.
Google will do the rest itself.
The bots will come and visit your site every now and then (Google gives you a lot of details about visitors and other stuff). They will keep adding URLs they find on your site to Google search results. Then people can at least be able see your site in search results by searching site: tristan.rf.gd.
Then if your site gets popular, it will start to appear more frequently when someone searches for something.
Another thing, programmable search bar from Google is totally useless in your case because your site is new and is pretty small. Google search bar is for different purposes not for people being able to navigate through your site. You have to implement that yourself.
Okay. Thanks! I’ll have to try to find another search bar then/have to make a search bar myself. It’ll be garbage but better than nothing.
Specifically it’ll just have a list of page names and their respective URLs, and then when you click search it’ll take your search query and try to find it in the page names, and display all the pages that contain that string you inputted into the search bar.
Please tell me if there’s a better way to do this (preferably no backend code because i’m stupid + i don’t know any php/sql but if it’s simple i can maybe do it)
Create a JSON containing all possible URLs, title, and keywords.
When someone types into your search bar, you show results based on their input from the JSON. All of this will be carried out using Javascript, so no backend.
That is the only way for you search bar to work without backend and database. One drawback is if you write a new article like Atlanta.html, it won’t add that automatically, you will have to add it to JSON yourself. For all of it to be automatic, a little backend is required.
These are relatively simple steps to follow. If you are still struggling you can contact me on Discord. So I can help you more freely there of course (for free by the way).
All of this is very simple to set up.
