Proprietary or Custom Search Engines -- Don't!

One of the things that irks me about many of the sites I visit is the steaming pile of shite they call searching. Between the missing entries, the irrelevant articles and, this is my killer, only actually using one of the search words provided I cant see why people even bother to put the entry box on the site when you can get far superior results from Google.

Now before I get accused of being a hypocrite I’d like to point out that the Unixdaemon.net search box is actually provided by, and uses, Google so the results, while not always bang up-to-date are typically useful and honour the actual search you enter.

If you have your own site PLEASE don’t try and write your own search engine from scratch unless you have a fair amount of practical and proven knowledge of how to do it. If the site does have a sucky search engine there are a couple of ways to use Google to your searching advantage, but thats best saved for another post.