The last couple of days I’ve been working on improving the in-site search on this website. The old search was quite good, but it returned a list of full posts as a search result. It was difficult to get a good and quick overview of the results that way. When you included comments in the search it didn’t display the comments so you didn’t know whether or not the result was from a post or a comment. Last but not least, it didn’t search in pages. It wasn’t that big an issue for me because I only have one page, but in the future I plan to add more.

Enter the new search

I tried to keep as close to the major search engines' way of displaying results, but added some information relevant for blogs such as tags and categories. Try a search for code or Mads.

As you’ll see from the search results it displays posts, pages and comments in the same result page. It also tells you the type of each result so you can decide whether or not it is relevant to you.

Comment search

It has been possible to include comments in search results ever since BlogEngine.NET 1.0, but with this new search it gets more transparent. You can for instance search for your own name to see all the comments you’ve written yourself. That way I can see that Phil Haack has commented 6 times on my blog and Scott Hanselman has written one comment.

This new search feature will of course be included in the upcoming version of BlogEngine.NET due in a few weeks.

Do you know the kind of guy who thinks viruses only effect people who don’t know what they are doing and because of that never felt the need to install an anti-virus/malware/spyware program? That guy is me. I’ve never had a virus before and therefore never had an anti-virus program either. Why should I? They slow down your machine and are just annoying and as long as I’m not stupid enough to get a virus, all is good.

Then it happened. Yesterday. I got my first virus and I have no idea from where. It’s not directly malicious but it changes my internet settings and I keep getting a popup saying “Windows security warning, click yes to download an anti spyware program”. I of course click no, because something doesn’t smell right.

I know that I’ve never had a virus because I occasionally run the online Panda ActiveScan or the Trend Micro HouseCall. They both run in the browser and have never found virus on any of my machines ever. Right now, I run the Trend Micro to get rid of the pesky intruder.

I’ve always been proud to say that I’ve never had a virus, so the fact that I finally got one leaves me ashamed and angry for allowing it to do whatever it does. There goes my perfect track record.

So the question now becomes whether or not I want to install an anti-virus program to prevent future attacks. It would be the logical thing to do I presume. Well, think of it in another way. If you walked the same streets for 5 years to and from work and suddenly fell on the pavement and hurt your knee, would you then start wearing knee pads? Definitely not. It would be to admit being stupid and count on it to happen again soon because of my own recklessness.

What I’ve learned is that I have no problem getting a virus every five years, but I’ll bet the feeling of shame will be equally big next time in 2012. I’ll write another post about it then.