Cisco's slick new search engine

For a long time, cisco.com's search engine functionality was, let's say, less than optimal. Many people (myself included) opted to use Google instead, appending site:cisco.com to a query to locate relevant official content. Fortunately, Cisco recently unveiled a completely revamped and much more useful search engine.

cisco_search.jpg

Search results tend to be much more accurate than they were in the past, and the engine provides the convenient ability of filtering results to a specific document type (for example, to view only configuration guides or command references). One can also filter by product, product group, task, or site area, and subcategories under each heading allow for even more discretion.

Since the new search engine is so handy, I decided to include it in Firefox among Google and Wikipedia. You can too, by installing this OpenSearch plugin (right-click, save to your Firefox search plugins directory).

About the Author

Jeremy Stretch is a networking engineer and the maintainer of PacketLife.net. He currently lives in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Although employed full-time out of necessity, his true passion lies in improving the field of network engineering around the world. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

Comments

I used to work at Cisco and believe me.. finding things on the company intranet was impossible. In fact probably worse than the old web site search!

Quick way to make a Firefox keyword bookmark... Create a new bookmark with the following fields:

Name: Cisco Search Location: http://tools.cisco.com/search/JSP/search-results.get?strQueryText=%s Keyword: cisco

Voila... now you can simply type 'cisco ospf' in the address bar in firefox and it will supply the ospf as the search keyword for that URL.

That's pretty neat!

(I edited Steve's post above to contain the minimum form parameters in the URL for the sake of space.)

Hi Stretch, Cisco now provides Opensearch plugins for Cisco search and tools at http://www.cisco.com/web/tsweb/searchplugins/plugin_homepage.html

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