ottawa foodies

While browsing Google's AdSense offerings, I noticed that they have a Search option, in which I could have a Google search bar on my site that would allow you to search OttawaFoodies or the entire web. A few "sponsored" results show up (easy to ignore) and behave just like the ads on the left if people click on them.

The "find" button in the navigation bar above works reasonably well right now, but it isn't perfect and certainly lacks Google's sophisticated abilities. I'm also a little concerned about local search capability becoming a resource hog on my server, thus slowing things down for everyone.

With the Google search, results (e.g. for "escargot") would look a lot like: www.google.ca

How does everyone feel about this... should I add Google search?

I can see how it would be a benefit in taking the load off your server but be careful that the site doesn't lose those things that make it unique. I think it's cool that everything we see here is hand-rolled so to speak.

I've been quite happy so far with the search mechanism that FreshFoodie has provided. Do I need my new Google overlords to know about my search fetish for marscapone cream? ;-)

echoing the opinions above, i prefer local search. I'm not a python guy, so i have little idea what's involved, but what about using something like lucene?

While I have found a few quirks so far with local search, I am happy with it. The option is still there to use google just as noted above, if I have to. But I prefer local search, too. Though I know it's not necessarily trivial from a programming perspective.

All good points. Search was one of the things I didn't spend too much time on -- always figured I'd get back to it later. The main problem is that I don't limit anything. (try searching for "food")

I could see imposing a limit on the internal search (e.g. only search through 1 year's worth of forums) and then allow you to use the Google search if you need more. Anyways, not a critical issue at this point.

Thanks for your input!

I'd also prefer a local search, in an ideal world. The current search, I've found, is pretty picky. A number of times I've been searching for restaurants to see if they already have an entry and it's not hard to miss one if you don't spell it precisely. Can be an issue if there are apostophes or other puncuation involved, for example.

Yeah, I know there are problems, even though I try to minimize them by storing common misspellings in a secret "keywords" field that you don't see. The fact is, if I could do search better than Google I'd be living a very different life right now. ;-)

LOL Too true. The 800 lb. Gorilla of search-dom.

Once you know that the local search is picky, it's not too hard to compensate for it however. It trains you, you might say.