Non-deterministic Searching blogs

I noticed a funny thing when using my blog's search feature. I was trying to find my previous blog post "You can't debug yourself", which I explain that a managed debugger can't attach to itself.

If I used the search box on my blog's webpage (https://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall) to search for "Self", I get no results.

If I then search for "yourself", I get a bunch of entries, including the one I'm looking for.

But now if I then search for "self" again, I get a few results (but still not the one I'm looking for)

If I go to another machine and search for "self", I see the same thing. So there must be some server-side state involved here.

And if I search for "yourself" on that other machine, it first came up blank.

Interesting.

 

My conclusion:

It's just easier to use the 'site:' keyword to search my blog with a real search engine like live.com or google.

Searching with "site:blogs.msdn.com/jmstall yourself" works like a charm.

Next up on my blog todo list:
- Create a search macro
- use CSS magic to wire it into my blog's homepage and see if I can override the default search box.

I don't know how to create Live search macros, and I don't know CSS, so this will be a learning experience.