Searching for the cost of DIY
There’s a specialised human rights search engine that’s been launched – Hurisearch – involving most of the larger players in that field, and offering the opportunity for small organisations to join in.
Given the recent announcements about Google’s customised search offering I was anticipating that it would be built on the back of that technology. Instead it’s a service that has been developed over the last 3 years by FAST – an enterprise search company.
The timing of the two announcements though has the perennial development debate whirring away in the back of my mind – when is it better to use a ’shrink-wrapped’ solution or to ‘roll your own’?
In this case there’s an interesting fact tucked away in the Hurisearch documentation – they need $187,000 a year to keep the service going. Given the prominence of the FAST logo on the home page I’d suspect that there’s been a deal made, so the costs could be higher than that. How the overall price tag actually breaks down is another matter, but you’d expect that the development, maintenance and hosting costs to make up the majority of it.
Using Google Custom Search wouldn’t involve any monetary costs, but there would be a different set of issues to take on board:
- tucked away in the logo for the service is the word ‘beta’ – no service level guarantees at this stage (and it’s worth noting that their email service – Gmail – has been in beta testing since April 2004) and even when it is finally live you would expect it to be at a lower level than for a system that you are paying for
- no clear indication of how the search engine works – the natural assumption is that this sits on top of the normal Google search, but details about how this works aren’t generally available as, in common with other search engines, they’re fighting a constant battle against spam; the hope is that this extra dimension won’t detract from creating a good specialised search tool
- compromises on features – e.g. in addition to the content you see on a page Hurisearch will also look for metadata using a common standard (Dublin Core), currently this is not available in the Google offering
The issue of functionality available can be the seductive siren song of creating your own solution. All those extra bells and whistles that will make your site stand above the crowd. But it’s also worth taking a minute to reflect on the content in the Google Custom Search blog – the core development is ongoing and you’re not paying for it – and the activity of the development community in the discussion group.
The promise of a customised set of features can also be a distraction from the real work that is required – in the case of a search it might be less about the search page and more about creating the content and making sure that it’s all properly tagged & organised so that it’s easily found.
In the case of Hurisearch this functionality wasn’t on offer back in 2003, so their business case has a strong argument. It might still do so now if the additional features and service level are providing a real benefit to the intended audience – that’s not a judgement I can make. If you do decide to take the ‘roll your own’ route then at some stage you might need to concede that your trail-blazing development has been steamrollered by a major entity – and on the web that can be within a few years, or months if you’re unlucky.
If you’re thinking about different search options then you might want to check out the following resources to see what’s available:
