I have played with EE Search in the tutorials, and it seems to work ok. But I notice that the EE User Guide uses Google Search. Does anyone have the pro’s/con’s of each? recommendations?
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March 11, 2009 8:17pm
Subscribe [7]#1 / Mar 11, 2009 8:17pm
I have played with EE Search in the tutorials, and it seems to work ok. But I notice that the EE User Guide uses Google Search. Does anyone have the pro’s/con’s of each? recommendations?
#2 / Mar 11, 2009 11:24pm
I’ve never done any testing between the two, but I always use Expression Engine’s search function. It works consistently great and you can fine tune which fields get searched and don’t as well as easily customize the search results page and the search function.
#3 / Mar 12, 2009 11:17am
The EE user guide isn’t coming out of EE - hence the Google search.
Here’s what I’ve written about the EE search tool in the past:
EE’s supplied search engine doesn’t function like high-end search engines in that it doesn’t roll through your site, looking at and indexing your rendered pages. In my mind I think of that as an “outside-in” search, where a spider would just see your site as a collection of HTML pages as it comes out in the browser.
EE’s search is more of an “inside-out” approach, where it searches at the database level first then, when it finds a match, needs to be told where that database content is supposed to show up on the site. Because of this there are some inherent limitations that will affect your results:
Content that is re-used will not get multiple hits. For example - if your search contained words that were contained in the Latest News sidebar we created above, an outside-in search engine would return hits for every page/section on the site. EE’s inside-out search engine will return one hit, mapped to the weblog/comments template for that weblog entry.
Category content cannot be searched. EE 1.6.1 has increased category capabilities with its category custom fields, but anything stored at the category level isn’t currently included in the search.
Adding to that:
You can’t run one search against weblog content, forum content and wiki content - you’ll need separate searches.
Anything stored as titles, descriptions or custom fields in the Photo gallery will not be searched.
If using the Multiple Site Manager the search will run in the current site only - you can’t run an installation-wide search and aggregate the results.
#4 / May 15, 2009 7:15pm
The EE user guide isn’t coming out of EE - hence the Google search.
Just curious…What is it then? looks a lot like weblog with categories…