The search is a very important part of every website. I search on my own website many times a day. Friends are asking me for help and I direct them to one of my articles, but before I get the link I have to make a search in the blog.

On this website I am currently using the default wordpress search, but I have other sites where I experiment with google custom search.

The main reason I tried google custom search on other blogs is that I can get some revenue for people searching on the website. Actually, unless the website will have millions of visitors every month you won’t make too much money from google custom search. I have a website where I receive 50 000 visitors every month and I hardly make 50 cents/day from google custom search. So, it is not worth to keep Google custom search just for some revenue, it is very low compared to other incoming streams.

WordPress default search.

WordPress default search is simple, it will provide all posts that have the desired keyword anywhere in the title or content, in reverse chronological order. That’s the way it works and further explanations are useless.

The advantages are that the post can be retrieved in a order that is relevant for a blog, the most recent first and the least recent last.

The disadvantages are that if you search for “wordpress” on my website probably you will receive a list with all posts and pages from my blog. This is a disadvantage as people want to ignore posts about internet marketing and want to see only wordpress posts, and they have a hard time to accomplish this.

Google custom search.

The custom search from google provide your blog with a similar way of displaying results like they are displayed on the google pages.

The advantage is that when you search for a keyword, you get first the most important articles, based on the incoming links they have, which is a good factor to consider quality. If the article is good it will be linked more than an article wrote in hurry.

The disadvantage is that google custom search tend to weight more old articles, so when searching new articles will be ignored as they are very new and they do not have too many links indexed yet.

Which is better ?

It depends a lot of what content you are providing to your visitors. If you have a huge website and you write several articles every day, some of them low quality, others better quality you website may become cluttered and with the default search people may have problems to get the most relevant articles for their search. But if you have a website where you publish few articles every week, it means you put a lot of weight to every article you write and you may want that all articles to be considered to have a lot of weight. Also, if you run a news website then the chronological order is important, so if a user do a search don’t get very old results. When you are searching on a news website, you want to see the recent news first related to the entered query, not the most important ones.