WordPress default search vs Google custom search
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.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
December 15th, 2010 at 8:37 am
Hi Lucian, I am still struggling to sticking up with a single search option. First I used Google and now I am using WordPress default. My blog is more of a webmaster blog. So what do you prefer?
December 15th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
It depends on what kind of website you have, if the articles you write are in a specific order and they follow a line, i.e. you have to read a post before you read the next one in the same category, a blog that is organized more like a book, then I think the default search will do it.
Instead, if you write every article as it is the last one on your blog, and trying to provide the best value for a specific subject you threat, then google custom search is better. Popular posts will apear in top, and the popularity is decided mostly by quality and others interest in the article, by linking to it, commenting, and sharing on social networks.
December 15th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Hi Lucian,
I agree to some of the points, I like CSE to be in main search to for my blog. I am not worried on revenue part, the advantage of having the CSE is chances of your post getting index faster. It is just a SEO factor what I believe.
Thanks for Sharing
-Imran
February 6th, 2011 at 8:24 am
I agree – I stick with using the Google CSE option. One, it’s just a tad bit of extra revenue you normally wouldn’t be exploiting, and two…the results are still accurate enough that while they may not find exactly what they’re looking for, they’ll likely find an article of interest on the topic they’re searching for, AND if you use a LinkWithin/RelatedPosts type widget, they’ll see more options at the end of the post they’ve clicked on. One of which might be the article they were looking for. Tends to equal more time-on-site and pageviews.
Just my two cents.
February 6th, 2011 at 9:27 am
You have your point. As I said in the article Google custom search is best for relevancy. For example if you are on a blog about Internet marketing you may want to search for “money from blogging”. With google custom search you will get the most relevant results ( the most referenced from other blogs ), which usually is the most complete post about the topic your are looking for, then you can click on his tags or its category, or as you said use the related post feature.
If you do the same search on a default wordpress search you will get the newest result even if it is not so related with the content. You will get all posts containing those terms.
Instead, if you are searching on techcrunch about what happened in Egypt, or what is new on Android, you don’t want to find the most important and linked article, which is actually older. You may end up with results about Google Android 1.6 version. Instead, the default wordpress search will bring the latest posts containing the word you entered, so there are bigger chances you may find what are you really looking for: the news