It’s not a kludge. It’s a way to search websites that happen to have awful search (like Google Groups).
In most cases that works very well and it’s universally applicable. It’s a consistent search interface for (pretty much) any website there is. You can just throw Google at it and it works as good if not better than the websites’ own search (depending on how good that is), but it’s also a consistent interface you do not have to discover and re-learn for every website individually. Sometimes int
Kludge to me implies that it’s complicated to set up (it’s not; just “site:” in front of the website plus your search terms) or that is either not universally useable or at least requires a lot of manual adjustment every time you want to use it elsewhere (it’s not; universal and consistent search that works the same every time).
Sometimes a website’s own tools can be somewhat more comprehensive, sometimes they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to find anything at all.
You're right. But in the context of the largest and best search engine in the world it's a bit kludgey to not be able to use their supplied search tools for one of their own products, because they broke it so much, and to have to rely upon a different product.
> consistent search that works the same every time
+ vs "" ?
> sometimes they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to find anything at all.
Yes, Google search is a useful tool for websites that have hopeless search. I've used it for Wikipedia and other websites. It's baffling that Google's own product has search so broken that using a different Google product to search it is considered not-kludgey.
