There are lots of plugins which can accomplish any kind of search: relevancy search, weighted search with newest getting slightly more importance, alphabetic results, etc….

If WP improves the core search functionality, I think that there would still be a lot of people who are dissatisfied with it because we all have different ideas on what would make a good website search engine.

I would like to have a simple search in the core and plugins to improve the search function.

I need different search functions on different projects and this freedom is beautiful.

I agree with Otto:”…..”but I think having one of those as core is holding plugin authors back because they wrangle with the hooks instead of just writing something awesome that stands alone.”

Monika

It’s not just the WordPress search itself either. The WordPress Codex search is absolutely useless as well.

As far as supplemental results, I think I eluded to that in the original post. Some may not show up at all and others there are a delay on before they show up.

So far the best part about GCSE, though, is being able to integrate a whole network of websites into it. That is where it has truly shined for me!

With all that said, I think for some sites I would still prefer to have a use a better WordPress search feature, whether it is a plugin or built into the WordPress software itself.

I personally think that search is very important to a site as WordPress is being expanded and stretched into more of a robust CMS. A Google CSE works, but why should I have to go to Google for a decent search engine on my own site?

–Google makes it too easy (and tempting) for your searchers to move over to the google website or to other websites.
–Google will only show results that it has indexed and I know too there were problems with pages it deemed as a “supplemental” result. That meant many of your posts wouldn’t show up in the search results unless google determined it to be worthy enough (even if the content of post was bang on).

Things may have changed since I last looked at integrating google into my WordPress blog, but those were the two big no-nos that stopped me cold from proceeding further. I work hard for my traffic, why on earth would I let google sweep it away?

I truly hope the WordPress team isn’t spending any resources on integrating google with wp.

I’m more or less just trying to get a discussion going and see what people think. The default search has always really bothered me, so that is why I brought it up.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind if Automattic or the WordPress team managed an improved search plugin. I also think there are interesting possibilities with search, such as linking search to the Popularity Contest plugin and have it return results based off their popularity (helping the algorithm to find the most relevant results possibly).

All the possibilities are what makes WordPress so great!