Over time a lot of content will be generated by a site, especially a weblog or news-oriented site. Finding that content in a reverse chronological archive can be difficult and frustrating. Local search can make a site more accessible by providing readers with the means to dynamically zero in on the content they are looking for.

Built-In Search

Movable Type's public search interface originally began as an add-on to MT developed by Jay Allen before formal plug-ins existed. The code was later integrated into MT version 2.5.

The search engine provides a rudimentary means of querying an MT system for matching entries and comments with different configurable methods such as boolean queries, phrase searching, and regular expression matching, if desired. These different methods are covered in more depth in a bit.

The MT search engine also includes a comment search that lists all of the new comments posted to entries in the site in a specified interval. This particular search was used mainly as a listing function before comment moderation was introduced in version 3.0D and should be considered deprecated.