In the top menu or using the following link https://www.mmertens.eu/power-bi-search, you reach a customized google search engine.
It mainly works by defining the websites in which the search happens, rather than searching the whole internet. In this case, I loaded the URLs of the Power BI / SQL / Azure blogs into the customized engine. I know many good blogs, I did some research to find more, and I especially looked at the profiles of all 364 (as of July 2022) Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) for Data Platform – and added their blogs if they had one. I added some documentation sites like the Microsoft documentation, but also dax.guide or the Tabular Editor documentation.
Categories
One feature that I was able to add are categories. In a search result, you see the following categories that allow to narrow down the search results:
| MVP | Blogs / Websites of MVPs |
| Microsoft | Blogs of Microsoft employees and official Microsoft blogs (Power BI, Tech Community) |
| Docs | Microsoft documentation plus TE, DaxStudio documentation plus dax.guide plus Dax Patterns |
| Other | Other blogs (seems unimportant but here are really good non-MVP-ones) |
| Community | Tech Community, Power BI Community |
Extensions
I added a few so called extensions which are basically synonyms. For example I added “metrics”, the new name, for “goals” and vice versa. So when you use the old term for the search, you also get results of sites where the new term is used, and the other way round.
I tried to add intuitive abbreviations so that you can search for ppu (instead typing Premium Per User), as (analysis services), xl, te, te2, te3, mvp, bi, ssas, pbi, az, md and so on.
Preferred Results
For some special search terms I defined results that are listed on top of the other search results. Currently I used the terms that directly map to categories of the Power BI Blog. For example if you search for metrics, the link to the category “metrics” of the Power BI Blog is shown.
Advertisements
Currently, an ad-free version of the custom search engine costs money. Since I’m just testing things, I don’t want to pay for it. When I used the search, sometimes I get lots of google ads, sometimes only a few or no ad at all. Let’s see whether the search engine turns out to be useful. Maybe some BI company would like to sponsor some search requests? It is not too expensive.
