Real Tumblr Search
This is something I posted on Twitter, but since I have significantly more followers here, and it’s Tumblr (duh), I thought I’d post it here.
Are you sick of Tumblr’s (unfathomably) shitty search? I have a giant, pretty rotten, band-aid-y fix for you. The significant downside of this method is that it will give you too much information. But sometimes I’d rather have too much than basically none at all. (Which is what you get with the present Tumblr search.)1
- Surf on over to http://www.google.com/.
- Copy the next phrase.2
- site:*.tumblr.com:
- After the colon, press “Space” and enter your search term.
- It helps to be specific.
- Press “Enter.”
- Sift through this giant pile of search results for what you’re looking for.
Like I said, it’s about as far away from perfect as it can get without getting inadvertently closer to perfect. Like trying to dig your way to China to get away from the heat. But, again, like I said, if you want results, then this is one way.
-
I realize that the present Tumblr search only searches posts by people you follow. That would be huge. A fucking game changer. Awesome. If. It. Worked. Here’s a little story. I have a friend who has an idea for a website, which is a pretty good idea. But part of his idea is “We’ll have a search engine that…” Whenever he says that, I think his idea’s doomed because, duh, it’s not easy to make search engines. Fer-christ’s-sake, Twitter can’t make a search engine that works very well. You have to be a giant, unprofitable company to make a decent search engine. Forget about Tumblr and it’s small, VR-fueled (multi-million dollar) enterprise. “Never happen,” is what I think. ↩
-
Of course, I don’t think this method works for custom URLs. Eg, ones that aren’t “http://site.tumblr.com/,” but oh well. ↩
