Ragtrader.com.au is the official website for Ragtrader magazine. Australian fashion and apparel industry news, blogs, look books, new designers, trends, jobs.
Home page content defined by publishing rules. Google site search plugin
News listing pages
Is there a reason for choosing the Google Site Search plugin over Solr Pro?
We wanted to off-load the search responsibilities to an external service so
that additional resources weren’t taken up on the app servers. This
particular environment hosts a large number of sites on just a couple of
VMs so resources are very precious 
Ragtrader sits on the Yaffa Publishing digital services platform (running FarCry/Railo) along with 25 other magazine sites. As @justincarter points out, having search separate to the infrastructure helps remove load on the app cluster.
Also Google Site Search (GSS) has a lot of sophisticated options that allow you to filter by content type, order by date published, inject additional page metadata and more. You can run a single GSS service (with a single bill) that indexes a range of different sites (for example, all the Yaffa sites); the plugin config allows you to filter for a specific site.
There’s also a bunch of other features we don’t currently leverage in the plugin like boosting. These should be included when we look to revamp the plugin.
