[wp-hackers] WordPress Search

[Haluk Karamete]

Hi Guys...

I have a question  that has two parts...

One philosophical and the other is practical... before I get into that, let
me set the context of this question.

This question does not apply to small business or blogs.
It applies to huge sites that have thousands of posts, perhaps over 100,000.

Search is a key feature to me, like to many other people.

I know there are a ton of great plugins out there specializing on search.
There are great minds & work behind those plugins & I respect the work
highly.

But when it comes to search, I don't think Google is beatable.

I think no matter how dedicated a group might be, they won't be able to
come up with something that does better than what Google can. I'm including
in this statement Yahoo & Bing, let alone the plugins that I've talked
about.

There are 2 kinds of searches to me.

the kind that is super accurate ( accurate to the dot ) and this kind of
search usually comes with no wisdom. They are handy for certain
implementations such as searching a code base.. you can go really accurate
with all kinds of  and's &  or's & contains etc...  like an editor's search

and there is the other kind of search..  this one comes with wisdom.
it won't match to certain results because it *somehow* factors in some
wisdom, and it simply avoids some results that the first type of search
mentality I've referred above. For example, a query on "Ramadan" won't
match "Tariq Ramadan" here. But yet a query on "5 Pillars" matches "Five
Pillars". Well, that's google.

I'd like to hear your opinions on this. Cause I maybe seeing it wrong,
there could be some solutions that come somewhat close to Google's way of
doing it. But honestly, I'm almost 100% sure, that there is no better way.

Until you convince me otherwise, I would think that if you are in charge of
a site like TechCrunch, New York Times or NPR etc, the search must be based
on Google.

Second part of my question is if you agree with this point of view of mine,
would you please give me a few leads as to which plugins or solutions that
you may recommend that would integrate Google search into a WordPress site.

And BTW, I just did a search on wordpress.org just to see how Wordpress.org
was handling the search ( cause honestly, I did not know how the codex
handled the search aspect & I was going to compare wordpress.org's search
results to google with site:wordpress.org - but it turned out that
WordPress.org too adapted Google when it comes to search. :)

In that case, I could ask now if there is a recommended practice in setting
up the custom google seathe way Wordpress.org did.

THank you