The Google Helper block is a very simple block for users of the Geeklog content management system.  Needless to say it could be adapted for any other weblog in about 5 minutes.

The idea is that with more and more traffic reaching sites via Google, often the search results refer to an article that has since been archived or at least ‘scrolled off’ the weblog’s latest 10 homepage stories.

All the Google Helper does is recognise when a page hit comes from Google, and redirect it with some basic parameters to the advanced search page, original query intact.

To see the block in action you need to arrive at PHPkitchen from Google.  Try this query on “PHP freelance” and click the first non-sponsor link, which at the time of writing was PHPkitchen.  The Google Helper block should appear in the top  right corner.

From what I’ve been able to deduce, a fair proportion of traffic comes (in my case) to PHPkitchen from Google but users often can’t be bothered to re-enter their original query once they don’t find what they’re looking for.

One drawback to the block is the lack of a fuzzy search to connect the query to.  One option would be to modify Geeklog‘s search to OR the search terms in it’s query.