As the number of posts on Letters Blogatory has grown (246 and counting!), I’ve found myself having to use the “search” box on the right side of the screen more and more often to look up old posts that I want to reference. And I’ve noticed that the search functionality is pretty poor. I’d like the search tool to be more useful for me and for you. Therefore, I’ve made some changes behind the curtain that should improve search results.

For example, you can now search for phrases in quotation marks accurately. Suppose you’re interested in all cases where I’ve discussed Article 19 of the Hague Service Convention. With the prior search tool, you couldn’t really search for this exact phrase. Now, if you type "Article 19" into the search box, you’ll get a short list of every post that uses the term. If you do a search with more than two terms without quotation marks, you’ll get a list of all posts that contain all of the terms (as though you’d done a Boolean search using the AND connector), and if there aren’t any posts with all the terms, you’ll get a list of all posts that contain any of the terms (as though you’d done a Boolean search using the OR connector).

Of course, you can also use the tag cloud on the right to do searches. This is particularly useful if you’re searching for all posts involving a particular foreign country. But the tag cloud shows only the most frequently used tags, so if you’re looking for cases on Mongolia, for example, you’re probably better off using the search box. (Or take a chance and type the following URL into your browser: https://lettersblogatory.com/tag/Mongolia. You can do this with any tag!)

I hope you find this new search functionality helpful. Thanks as always for reading!

Photo credit: Tall Chris (license)