Yesterday I wrote about Apple’s update push of Safari and how easy it would have been for Apple to do the right thing. With Google’s most recent addition to search, “search within a site,” things are a bit more difficult to figure out. At the moment when you search on Google bestbuy you get a site search box in addition to the search results. The same is true for a number of other e-commerce and content sites (e.g. Washington Post).

From the merchant’s or publisher’s perspective this is pretty questionable. BestBuy may want to present special offers on its homepage, keep track of a visitor’s search history (in order to present customized offers), run its own ads (and certainly prevent competitive ads from showing up), etc.

Now some have argued that from the searcher’s perspective this is an improvement over the often slow and incomplete searches offered by sites. And folks point out that this has been possible on google previously by clicking on Advanced Search or by adding site: to a search query (but clearly only a tiny fraction of power users knew and made use of the latter). For instance, the comments on the Techcrunch post mostly revolve around these two arguments.

These arguments ignore an important reality: Many people use search engines for navigation instead of typing URLs into the browser’s address bar. It is quite likely that many of those people will assume that the site search box offered by google has some kind of official status. That would not be bothersome if in fact this type of search delivered clear benefits to the those searcher.

But by and large people already know that they can type the name of let’s say a camera directly into google and get results that will include listings from BestBuy. In fact, when you do that, you get results across merchants. It’s an area in which google could do a much better job at organizing organic search results by distinguishing between e-commerce sites and media/blog coverage and reviews. So it’s hard to see how offering the site search box offers any meaningful value for a searcher relative to what google could do. At the same time site search removes some of the features that e-commerce and content sites do provide as part of their search, such as suggesting related items or offering promotions, which are in fact value-added for most searchers.

Bottomline is that I don’t believe this delivers net value to the average searcher and adds no value to advanced searchers who already know how to add “site:” to their queries.