Seeing as how there are at least a few other webmasters hanging around here, I thought I'd ask you guys this question:
For the past two or three years, I've been using the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine to run the searches on my site. It's a pretty useful tool, with the ability to perform searches by section of my site (by directory) in addition to searching the entire site.
However, I've come to realize that the FDSE only runs a general search based on the number of occurrences of the given terms that are being searched for. I've investigated a script that uses the Google API to provide searches of my site using their engine and database, and it seems to work pretty well. (Well, it did until I moved to my new server, which doesn't yet have a certain tool that's required to run the script installed, but they're going to install it soon.)
So here's my dilemma: Google provides better search results, but the FDSE has some better features. But how important do you think those features are? I did some checking in my old search logs, and it turns out that out of the 930-odd searches that were performed in the last year, only about 10% of them were performed on a specific realm (as opposed to the entire site).
I guess it all boils down to this: Do you think that 10% of the searches is significant enough to justify a decision to keep using the old search engine instead of switching to Google?
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Well, if Apple thinks that a market share of 10% is significant enough to justify their decision to continue to build Macs, then 10% of a search share is probably significant enough to justify a decision to keep using the old search engine. B)
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
Given a choice, let the people decide....
Post both and see which the majority of your vistors choose, then either keep both as a conveinience(close enough), or remove the lesser used.....
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
All this fuss because Google turned up one more result than the other one did?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
No, it's not because Google returned one extra result -- it's mainly because of how the two engines order the results. FDSE just does a straight occurrence search, while Google has its fancy algorithms to determine the relative importance of the word.
I'm mainly trying to gauge opinion about which might be better/more desirable for visitors.