agaffin - 6:02 pm on Feb 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

Proprietary tags are fine if your search engine can support them. One of the things I really like about Ultraseek (um, Inktomi Enterprise Search, or whatever they call it these days) is its ability to support custom meta tags. Another is a thesaurus function, which lets you match common misspellings with correct ones.

But it sounds like some of your concerns have more to do with the quality of the meta data or the results set than with whether you have a search link or box. That gets into issues of proper tagging, using a search engine that doesn't index toolbars, etc.

I prefer putting search boxes on every page. We've found that some users like to browse and some use the search engine as their main navigational tool - for such people, it might be annoying putting the search function one more click away. But supporting that assumption really means making sure the underlying documents are set up to return relevant results.