I’m not convinced by the granularity argument. We have an advanced search form for our online collections database – it gets less than something like 50 users a week according to Google Analytics.

We’ve just bought the business version of Google custome search, and written a little module that integrates it into our CMS. So you can now visit the Maritime Museum site, search for everything about the ‘Second Dutch War‘ (say) and get back results from our online catalogues, journal articles and general stuff in the CMS. Much better than the old search, where you had to visit the search boxes of the various different sites in turn.