Wikipedia, and particularly the related sites running the software released as MediaWiki, have some of the worst site search I have ever seen. The default installation's query processing is absurdly limited, the retrieval is crippled by bad settings, the relevance is unclear, and the results page is not just ugly but contradictory and confusing.
Extensive review of all aspects of the Webinator search engine, including locating documents, indexing content, query processing and expansion, retrieval, relevance ranking, results page layout, search reports and administration.
This is an extensive comparison of features of the search engines Alkaline, Fluid Dynamic, ht://Dig, Juggernautsearch, mnoGoSearch, Perlfect, SWISH-E, Webinator, and Webglimpse. All are free to users, but only some are open source software. This comparison is oriented towards technical indexing, query processing, retrieval and relevance features.
Results of studies of search user experience at the Florida International University Usability Research Lab show that search tasks can be divided into straightforward questions (how many homeruns did Barry Bonds hit last year?) and more complex research (is the economy going to improve?), and that users approach these tasks differently, and may need to customize their interfaces, or use alternative interfaces such as tables with rows for each result.
Detailed review of the features of the search engine covering robot crawling, indexing features, search features, results customizing and reports.
Thorough discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of using remote search services, how well their indexing robots handle standards and links, search and relevance ranking features, search features, results customization, maintenance and reporting.