Why do personal site search engines suck?

[kyle]

I've notice especially on news sites but even on many personal blogs searching sucks and either doesn't give you results or gives you too many results.

Many sites either don't have a date search box or if they do it rarely ever works.


Also forums seem to cleverly hide their search boxes too where it's like playing one of those hidden object games.

Anybody else get frustrated using a search that does a certain webpage only?

[ªXe]

Yes, you are very right. And thats because we dont give a lot hard work for our code on search engines.
It can be over come by adding exact tags as required, and using those tags in our search engines database. But it wont work for forums. For forums, it should be correct use of words in Headings or Topic heads.
personal websites are made with an expectation that ppl will come from google, friends, or other friends site,. Visitors will read, visit archives, other topics in side bar if they see anything interesting or/and leave. Because of this pattern, personal sites builder rarely make or give a lot effort in coding accurate code for search.

Ppl with huge websites have guarantee that ppl will use their search bar, so they give a lot effort for their search engines to give accurate results.

[Skoonk]

A lot of work goes into designing a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo!. Unfortunately, the high expectations set by these products trickles down into all websites working as well as these search engines.

Providing some insight, a site's search engine typically only looks through their own database. Several things that make it difficult to deliver quality results:

1) Ranking - How do you rank pages for quality or relevance when it's on their own site? Google and others base their results on how often a page is linked to by other sites as well as how other users rate the page based on their search and browsing habits.

2) Keywords - Most site searches only look for words you type. What if you type "children" instead of "kids"? Google and others know how to deal with synonyms.

3) Speed - Most personal sites don't run on such power computers as Google and others, which consume entire datacenters. Their results would take too long to deliver if they do extremely complex queries.