These days, if all the pages on a site are publicly spidered, then it's likely that Google will do a great job of searching your site for you. I've seen many s

These days, if all the pages on a site are publicly spidered, then it's likely that Google will do a great job of searching your site for you. I've seen many sites with terrible search boxes that look like they use the built-in MySQL full-text search. I find I often get better results by just searching through Google with a site: tag. It makes me think of cases where OpenID is used over in-house authentication. Why maintain something when there are already free systems that will do that for you and have worked out all the kinks?