Continuing my product bashing.. (God I like doing this) this time we will look at UCM search. Search box have become as important as navigation bar for websites. Who has time to go through good old site map. Users come in key in the word and hit search button. Now if you have purchased UCM and building your website you should decide on the search strategy for your website upfront to avoid surprises. People should be educated that out of the box will not work like Google or Yahoo. Oracle has not spent enough time on this. There are enough literature available on Enterprise search and its maturity in ECM products, I am going into that.
But simply put this way; you cannot go with 'out of the box' search functionality. For starters they wont return best results. They return last updated content items. You cannot rig search results. You cannot say, when ever some one searches for a dog, this should be the first result etc. Search key word highlighting is another issue. This requires a customisation.. Lot of other short comings.
So what will you do. Luckily Google comes to rescue here. Wait for some time for Google to index your website and then go for Google Custom search. This is at a nominal fee you can integrate to your website for ad-free search results. Integration is pretty straight forward and requires minimal customisation.
