DMN Managing Editor suggests Google best for searching DMN site

True, that. When the paper's ME admits _ in an Internet post, for all the world to see _ the web site sucks, I have to admire his candor but rip the fact that a major newspaper who is pinning its future on its web site continues to fail to get its web site right.
Maybe the DMN needs to out-source things to ... India or somehwere.

 

It's not just the DMN.
I don't know about anyone else, but we have the same problem at my place. Our internal archive is fine, but Google News is much faster for anything less than a month old. And the search function on our website is utterly useless. I find the same at a lot of other papers' sites.
For an industry that's placing all its chips on the web, we're doing a pretty piss-poor job with the basic infrastructure.

 

Our site search function's default is to provide results both from our site and our JOA paper's site. Many people have complained about this, and the suits and tech folks keep trotting out lame excuses for why it's this way.

 

I greatly enjoyed this part of a response (my bolding):

 

my old paper has a google search bar as part of it's web site. the company partnered with googs. my old editor there, since fired, would tell us...use the google search, not the site search. why, we asked? because we get money every time...

never saw any of that huge cash flow. and our former web site, which had a decent archive, disappeared. :'(

 

We have a large paper morgue (roughly 30 years of bound volumes and another 27 on microfilm). But as for online stuff, our web site is actually better than our regular computer system. I can find stuff from the last 10 years or so on the site, but if I search the computer archives I'm lucky to find something from two weeks ago.

 

We have every paper we've ever published (under both names; we merged in the mid-'90s) either in hard copy or microfilm. And our site's search function works pretty well. Our shop recognized the importance of the Internet fairly early and has worked hard to pump resources into our Web operation.