Search is the user’s lifeline for mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple search box on the home page and play down advanced search and scoping.

[Jakob Nielsen - Search: Visible and Simple - 2001]

I totally appreciate that to not offer users a search facility (particularly on a large content-driven website) is asking for trouble.

In an ideal world, of course one would exist. However, what if it throws up confusing results due to a poor search algorithm and/or the amount of content that has been tagged/classified incorrectly.

Poor search results lead to serious frustration. Often a user will be presented with a set of less than relevant results, but as they have personally made a choice to search, they often click one. At some point they need to abandon this route and select another (sometimes returning to search and trying again because they feel that the poor results were due to their own error).

Surely, the answer is to improve the quality of the results? Well this may not always be achievable in the short term due to the infrastructure of the organisation. If there’s 100 plus content authors, then retraining is quite an onerous task in itself.

So in summary, if realistically a search can’t display decent results, it’s better to not have one at all in the short term and guide the user to down other routes to locate their content.