Google search is usually behind when it comes to sites that are updated regularly, it’s been harder to test search in new builds that are not indexed also.
Native search would be lovely and fast and being able to design the output search results would be awesome!
I agree with a native solution as well but would even be happy for a native elastic search integration as well where we still use our own API keys. Elfsight isn’t ideal IMO.
However, I’ve been using SearchIQ and they were amazingly easy to integrate. Elfsight was extremely complex and cumbersome, but I had SearchIQ up and running with just one injection, one HTML element on a otherwise blank search results page, and one HTML element in my site’s header.
The only problem with non-native solutions–whether easy like SearchIQ or hard like Elfsight–is that they can’t be tested and fine-tuned in the Sitejet preview sites… you have to go live in order for the Javascript injections to work (because of cross-site protections), and without Sitejet separating between a “save” and a “publish”, that’s pretty dangerous.
Thank you so much for your great feedback! Would you like to give me the website ID / domain, so I could have a look for myself? You could also send a DM for this if you do not like to share this publicly.