I’ve been reading “Don’t Make Me Think,” the widely acclaimed and recommended  book by Steven Krug. Unless my interpretation is wrong, he seems to think that a site search is a necessary feature; but I’m not so sure I can agree with that.

Here’s a post on Future Now’s blog, GrokDot.com that clearly illustrates how useless site - or useful - a site search can be:

So you think you need an insite search engine?

After having done many searches on a number of sites recently, it was the exception rather than the rule that I found what I was looking for, even when the item or topic of the search was actually on the site, or on pages linked to from the site.

If users use a site search rather than the site’s navigation links, unless it works, couldn’t it do more harm tha good when the search doesn’t give what they’re looking for?

I finally got around to uploading some pages to my “information” site (WebmasterWoman) and it’s about time. There’s been some discussion about SSI lately in an online group I’m in so I decided it was time to put up what I’ve had sitting on my hard drive where it doesn’t do any good at all. I prefer using PHP Includes rather than  SSI, since then sites are compatible with other PHP features. I also put up the first of some PHP snippets that are huge time-savers, since they automatically update copyright and last modified dates.