Michael Krakovskiy blogs some excellent advice today…

“Do not implement search yourself. Your CMS [content management system] sucks at search, and so do you. I see this again and again and again. Everyone is implementing search on large websites instead of using Google. Developers are afraid of looking unprofessional. Managers are answering yes to the question “do you want advanced/faceted search” (the correct answer is no – users don’t like it and don’t use it). As a result a lot of resources (both server and developer) go into implementing something that Google is awesome at.”

Excellent advice for most small budget-conscious firms. But Google CSE’s don’t always use the full Google database for searches. Some CSE user searches will only draw results from an undefined “sub-set” of the main Google index. Thus, for mission-critical search in large firms, a custom search-engine (Lucene, Sphinx, etc, rather than a CMS) is still the sensible option, unless Google can guarantee that every word in a file will be indexed and that searches will draw on all records.