Adding a search engine to a site used to be a difficult business. It could be expensive, difficult and quite often not very good.

A while ago Google launched Google Co-Op. It lets you create your own site search engine using all the power of the main Google search engine.

It's perfect for a small blog like this, so I decided to try it out to see what the pros and conns were.

Here they are:

Pros

• Easy to set up
• Free
• Good results
• Familiar to everyone
• You can link the advertising to your own Adsence Account
• URL exclude filters
• Simple stats on number of searches and popular search queries

Cons

•  You need to show adverts unless you are a charity or non-profit organisation
• Can be slow to index new pages
• Completely dependent on JavaScript
• Search result code is not W3C compliant

For me the pros outweigh the cons, so I'm going to keep the search page for this blog. However, if I was a larger organisation having to show ads could be a show stopper.