I’ve noticed that some search sets don’t use plugins, which got me to thinking about crawl vs search. Is this right – crawl will download (or attempt to) the entire site and then apply the search term, whereas search (via plugins) will use whatever engine(s) is/are specified to apply the search term. Is that the basics of it? And will a lot of modern sites that are built dynamically fail to be crawled because you can’t really download them?
TIA.
By default Crawl downloads the specified web pages (not the complete web sites). How many pages will be downloaded in addition to the specified ones depends on the “Follow Links” settings.
3yrs later I made interesting discovery - search will often lead to a larger set of results, because many search engines search synonyms etc without being told to.
Example on a very small set of Agile related blogs, I searched “Antipatterns” the community also uses “Anti patterns” and “Anti-patterns”. Search found all of those variants. Crawl didn’t.
Niether is right or wrong. Just good to know.
Using the term Anti-patterns would accept all these strings also in Crawl mode.
Good to know.
Since I didn’t even think about “Antipatterns” vs “Anti patterns” until a DevonAgent didn’t turn up posts I knew existed, I benefit from Search over Crawl. For others YMMV.