Dave came up with some new software for searching weblogs running on Manila (At least I'm assuming on Manila). The way he does it is pretty cool, and one that works well for how Manila is designed. It uses the Google API to send a query and then uses the results to pull entries from the blog database. I could actually see something similar being written for Movable Type, as I've found the searching they have built in tends to be a bit slow. That's the reason I replaced it with ht://dig. ht://dig isn't necessarily the solution for someone who isn't that much of a programmer, it takes a bit of effort to get it installed. But I could also see using something like Dave's software using ht://dig too (since you can format the output however you want). Does ht://dig give as good a set of results as Google? I'm not sure. But does it give search results that are good enough? I bet for most people it does. I've never had any real issues with it at least.
I really don't have any a bit problem with using Google for something like this. That's what's it's for. But I tend to think of how things work when third party services aren't around. What happens if someone goes to search and Google is down. With something like ht://dig, the site would be running it locally so would have a bit more control over it.
