You lose trust in the search function very quickly, if you gain it at all. > Unless you want to argue that the specific sites' search functions are poorly made. Your search will just suck, and your app will be less usable.
TLDR, Maybe google search works for searching wikipedia, which is perfectly loyal to the original If you work at Reddit though, and your search sucks, google will not fix this. Google search as a whole is much, much richer but most of what makes Google good today has less to do with your use case anymore. That makes Google relatively worse at what it was once best at. Half the game is over control, and controlling UIs matters the most.Īlso, the power of pagerank has dwindled as the web itself changed. It would have been cool if the web had really developed into the hopeful, "semantic web era" where this kind of approach works. Spolsky original UI concept totally leaned on Google for search, but SO still has its own.Īt some point, you'll need results to take inventory into account or make autocomplete smarter about tags. Even so, you'll eventually roll your own. As you say, stackoverflow, wikipedia & such. There are cases where google really is the best way. IE, if you have an online store, travel site or dating app with a search based UI, then you'll probably roll your own.
Or, search is a primary feature and then you need control over it. This is not the phenomenon of a superior way winning out.Įither search is not an important feature, and a suboptimal, DIY implementation that looks OK is good enough. This is true in principle, but in practice, the use of 3rd party search has died down over the last decade.