[QUOTE=Subway Prophet]
:rolleyes:
Have you ever written a custom crawler and search engine for a website? More than one website? How about an engine that combines your blog, your image gallery, your forums, and your contact us page? What if part of your website is implemented in PHP and another part written in ASP.NET? Google’s crawler, query parser and search engine is a bit more sophisticated than what I can cobble up on my own within reasonable time, it’s free, it doesn’t care how the website is implemented, and it’s easy to integrate into any website.
I mean, sure, a websurfer could fire up google.com and do the query himself, if he has the know-how. But most people don’t know how to use the advanced search options in Google without loading up the advanced search page. I think that, even for a dumb Google search of your website, most people would appreciate a query textbox on your sidebar rather than nothing at all.
[/QUOTE]
It depends. If I type something into the box, will it search with a “site:” or something similar, or will it simply do a Google search over the entire internet? Or, is there an option? If there is an option, don’t make “The Web” the default because I wanted to search the whole web, I wouldn’t do it through your site, I’d just use Google directly. Using Google to allow people to search within your site makes sense. Basically just embedding Google within your site does not.