This is true in principle, but in practice, the use of 3rd party search has died down over the last decade. This is not the phenomenon of a superior way winning out.
Either search is not an important feature, and a suboptimal, DIY implementation that looks OK is good enough. Or, search is a primary feature and then you need control over it. IE, if you have an online store, travel site or dating app with a search based UI, then you'll probably roll your own.
There are cases where google really is the best way. As you say, stackoverflow, wikipedia & such. Even so, you'll eventually roll your own. Spolsky original UI concept totally leaned on Google for search, but SO still has its own.
At some point, you'll need results to take inventory into account or make autocomplete smarter about tags... and now the headache is yours anyway.
It would have been cool if the web had really developed into the hopeful, "semantic web era" where this kind of approach works. That didn't happen. Half the game is over control, and controlling UIs matters the most.
Also, the power of pagerank has dwindled as the web itself changed. Links aren't what they used to be. That makes Google relatively worse at what it was once best at. Google search as a whole is much, much richer but most of what makes Google good today has less to do with your use case anymore.
TLDR, Maybe google search works for searching wikipedia, which is perfectly loyal to the original WWW concept. Even they have a DIY search. If you work at Reddit though, and your search sucks, google will not fix this. Your search will just suck, and your app will be less usable.
> Either search is not an important feature, and a suboptimal, DIY implementation that looks OK is good enough. Or, search is a primary feature and then you need control over it. IE, if you have an online store, travel site or dating app with a search based UI, then you'll probably roll your own.
Most stores have garbage search and even worse filtering. >98 % of stores have only categories for filtering and only trash like "price" for sorting. In the 2 % of stores that can actually do faceted search the number of facets is too small (e.g. shoe stores which only have a "size" facet plus categories) or the data in the facets is garbage. This is likely a big contributor to sites like Geizhals existing, whose sole purpose is to offer decent search and filtering.
Ninety percent of ecommerce sites have terrible search because ninety percent of everything is crap [1].
That doesn't mean that having a great search can't help your shop get repeat customers, just like good service, fast shipping or a good checkout flow can.
If you have bad search, and search is a primary feature, then your ux sucks. I just don't think "just use google" is a viable alternative to making search good.
If you're making an online store, search is probably important, and a major determinant of how well the software works. The best way to handle that is with search that doesn't suck. It may be hard, but that's the job. Fair point that search is not trivial to do well, but that doesn't mean it isn't the job.
Either search is not an important feature, and a suboptimal, DIY implementation that looks OK is good enough. Or, search is a primary feature and then you need control over it. IE, if you have an online store, travel site or dating app with a search based UI, then you'll probably roll your own.
There are cases where google really is the best way. As you say, stackoverflow, wikipedia & such. Even so, you'll eventually roll your own. Spolsky original UI concept totally leaned on Google for search, but SO still has its own.
At some point, you'll need results to take inventory into account or make autocomplete smarter about tags... and now the headache is yours anyway.
It would have been cool if the web had really developed into the hopeful, "semantic web era" where this kind of approach works. That didn't happen. Half the game is over control, and controlling UIs matters the most.
Also, the power of pagerank has dwindled as the web itself changed. Links aren't what they used to be. That makes Google relatively worse at what it was once best at. Google search as a whole is much, much richer but most of what makes Google good today has less to do with your use case anymore.
TLDR, Maybe google search works for searching wikipedia, which is perfectly loyal to the original WWW concept. Even they have a DIY search. If you work at Reddit though, and your search sucks, google will not fix this. Your search will just suck, and your app will be less usable.