Re: Search doesn’t use tags, nor headlines
Yah, Google search is the best way I know to search multiple *Press sites.
I should highlight some downsides though:
* The search is not necessarily live; it’s searching Google’s version of the site, not your live site. So it’s especially important to have live Google Sitemaps on any WordPress or bbPress installs you want searched.
* You want to make sure that any subdomains do a good job of hiding pages that you don’t want searched. For example, I have MediaWiki on a subdomain… which does a bad job of hiding the editable version of each page (and other random pages too, like WhatLinksHere). I fixed that with plugins and other hacks, but it cluttered my search results for a while.
Hmm, those are the big downsides. Overall though, you can’t beat the ease of implementation of a Google custom search engine!