This page covers custom-written and home-made search engines. Of these 25 entries, only a few people were satisfied with their search engines. Complaints include problems with coverage, duplicates, relevance ranking and speed.

Given these problems, and the number of solid search engines available, whether as commercial products, remote services or open-source code, I recommend against custom search engines.

Custom Search Tools Responses, sorted by rating

rating	how long	date reported	What works well about this search tool?	Any problems or issues with this search tool?
4	3 years	01/2000	-	-
4	2 years	01/2000	Searches all items coming up for sale	not really
4	2 months	02/2000	-	-
4	Don't know	11/1999	Fast	None
3	5 years	08/2000	Relevance ranking	complex queries
3	6 months	10/2000	Gets the documents needed	Does not support phonetics etc.
3	12 months	06/2001	simple	does not scan docs etc
2	4 years	01/1999	-	speed (possibly due to hardware)
2	3 years	01/1999	-	-
2	2 years	06/1999	-	-
2	1.5 years	01/2000	returns good set of results	performance not quite as good as needed
2	6 months	05/2000	easy to read results	results not ranked by relevance
2	6 months	06/1999	Does a simple, keyword-based search.	Users need a full-text search
2	don't know	09/1999	Gets the results	Somebody installed the code, and nobody here know how to modify it. Want a simpler search mechanism.
1	3 years	04/2000	T	It only performs top-level text searches
1	2 years	06/2001	Not a lot	Difficult to find, hard to use, cannot search the content of PDF documents
1	2 years	11/1999	-	too limited, can not do multi-word search
1	2 years	05/1999	-	not specific in returning results; no ability to do advanced searching or modify searches or refine search within a returned set of search results
1	14 months	07/2001	-	We have had many. At this time it isn't working at all. We used this because at the time we were being hosted and could not install any software. We are changing from an NT server to and inhouse UNIX server and I need a search engine that will work with this.
1	6 months	06/2000	it index all site	not accurate searches
1	6 months	03/2000	-	-
1	2 months	01/2000	nothing	too slow, does not find everything it should, returns poor results
1	2 weeks	06/2000	-	doesn't give an adequate order related to relevance to the hits
1	not yet	10/1999	it was ready on schedule.	result format is minimal and erratic too many duplicates finds pages it shouldn't
1	Under construction	06/2001	Integrated with TWiki	Does not include: -proximity -phrases -other

 

July 2001 Survey Results

Sites & Search
 - Why Install
 - Why Not Installed
 - Site Sizes
 - Update Rate
 - Server Location
 - Languages
 - Multilingual Sites
 - File Formats

Ratings
 - Summary
 - Popular
 - Custom
 - Others