Making Exhibit Text Searchable

I'm adding a lot of text as exhibits and I'd love to make the pages retrievable in a search. Right now only items come up, and it would be great if exhibit pages were also discoverable via keyword search. Would this be a possible "Exhibit Builder" feature?

I have to second this request. It's kind of vital for our planned use.

A workaround could be to use Google CSE or similar as the default site search, with the advanced search to be kept for detailed searches of the collection.

I'll third this request.

Our pilot project in Omeka includes a large amount of transcribed text that some of our users would find immensely valuable if they could find it through a simple search.

I also have most of the content added as textual resources and I would love to have such an engine.

I would also like this feature. I'm building a site in which all the items are hidden unless they are used in an exhibit. Is there some way to hack the search process to ONLY return exhibits?

The issue here is that the current search system is entirely set up only to return items. Consider using an external search service like Google Site Search or Yahoo BOSS, which will simply index the content of all your pages.

As an aside, would it be helpful for anyone here if the Exhibit Builder had a simple way to pull text from item metadata? So for those of you who have said they have lots of content that exists only as Exhibit Builder text blocks, you could instead have the text "live" in an item, yet still be easily contained in an exhibit?

I think that could potentially be really useful. From what I've seen, people use EB in lots of different (probably unexpected) ways and I can imagine a few projects where one might benefit from bringing exhibit text into the item/show page (e.g. teachers using omeka in the classroom sometimes create prompts for students within exhibits).

I'll look into some external search services.

For our project, we would still need to search the Exhibit Text because an individual item may be used in multiple exhibits, and the exhibit text is what our archivists will use to give it context in that that exhibit. Hope that helps!

I am implementing Google Site Search, but unless I'm missing something, am I right in thinking this has to be done in the code and not the theme? I've put some Google code in application/helpers/FormFunction.php. If there was a way to do this that could be carried along in the theme files, it would be a lot easier on my coworkers (and my future replacement). Thanks!

What in FormFunctions were you changing?

In general, you should be able to do something like this in a theme or plugin, which would make upkeep much easier.

For our purposes, storing exhibit text as archive items wouldn't be as useful unless there were a way for the search results to then link directly to the relevant exhibit page rather than the item view.

We're creating some fairly complex exhibit layouts with multiple items, both images and text blocks, that wouldn't be as useful to our users without the full context of everything together.

(This would probably make more sense if I could show you, but the project I'm working on at the moment won't be public for a couple more weeks. Just know that it's a lot more complicated than the pilot project: http://exhibits.congregationallibrary.org/exhibits/show/1843churches .)

At the moment, something like Google Custom Search or another service or system that simply searches whole pages would probably be your best bet.

Even if Omeka's advanced search "knew" how to search whole exhibit pages, it would still be constrained by MySQL's full-text search features, which aren't nearly as good as some of the tools that are actually designed for indexing and searching web pages.

I'd very much like to see exhibit texts searchable as well once this becomes technically feasible with MySQL (maybe w/ v5.6? http://blogs.innodb.com/wp/2011/07/overview-and-getting-started-with-innodb-fts/). I'm creating a lot of text only content as transcriptions and translations of individual page scans.