By popular demand I’m going to write articles on how to use some of idlasso’s more advanced features, starting this week with search.
idlasso has a comprehensive search mechanism. You can search by:
- A persons name or username – for example “Palmer“, or “George“
- Common account names that the user may have – for example “Georgio_1999“
- A specific account on a certain service – for example “flickr:georgio_1999“
The syntax for the last option is the service name followed by a colon, followed by the username to search for on that service. You can find a list of service names we support and the string to use on our supported accounts page. Medium-Long term this will provide great opportunities for building browser plugins around the idlasso search engine – for example a plugin that detects when you are viewing a flickr profile that has been registered on idlasso. This could then display the users card so you can quickly navigate to their other web accounts or contact them.
idlasso also provides a series of finer controls over how you appear in search results. Firstly you can turn search for your profile on or off by going to your account settings page. If off this will stop you occurring in any search results as well as the user directory. If turned on it uses a sensible default of only exposing your username and real name to the public. All you other remaining information is only searchable by friends. This works really well as your friends can find more information on you whereas random internet surfers can’t.
Secondly you can fine control the search even more by using the search permission links on the manage accounts, manage resources and user details pages. This will allow you to choose public, private or friends access rights for each bit of data (see screenshot). Although the defaults work well for most users you may want to expose some of your accounts to the public or keep some private from search. This option allows you to do this.
So the idlasso search provides many ways for you to find users and many ways to control how you appear in the results. One final note is it can take upto 24 hours for any changes to appear in the search engine, but if you’re desperate to have it immediately you can turn search off for your profile and then turn it on again.
Tags: search
