I really like WordPress, I’m glad I moved to it from Blogger.  I think with the right templates it’s pretty flexible, I wish I had a) more time and b) more css/layout skill to do some template work.  However, WordPress search sucks.

It sucks for a few reasons,

1. results come back in reverse date order (which makes sense for a blog but is too inflexible)
2. there’s no indication in the search results which words matched the article
3. the search just takes all the terms and does a basic sql query for any of them, so if you search for ‘i like bacon’ you get posts with the word like and then posts with the word bacon
4. the standard navigation doesn’t tell you how many pages of results you got, just that you can read the next page

For blogs, I guess it’s ok as a basic tool, but really it should,

1. return posts by most relevant first
2. do proper searches based on the phrase you submit
3. indicate which words matched the post
4. show how many posts matched
5. list the posts by just title, or summary or full and allow you to switch
6. show which page you’re on, if there are more than one page of results

I’ve looked at various plugins, but not really had any luck finding one which fixes all the problems.  I’ll keep looking.