It depends. If your main UI involves search, you might want to make sure that it is actually usable, competitive and not embarrassing.
If your main business is selling stuff that users find via your search features, then doubly so of course since you are literally losing cash every time your search ends up not doing its job. Easy to measure too and most eCommerce companies that survive long enough do that obsessively because it shows in their recurring revenue if they don't.
Also, if your competitors have awesome search and you don't, your users might realize and jump ship. If you have content that is great but nobody is finding it, you might want to fix it by allowing them to find it via better search functionality.
If search is actually not critical to your UX or product, then by all means, cut corners. Google will happily redirect users to your competitors as well. Make sure to give them plenty of money for keywords. If you don't, somebody will. Either way, your analytics will tell you how people come to your site and what they do once they get there.
Either way, it's not that hard to build a decent search experience if you know what you are doing. The key point of this article is that many engineers kind of don't know what they are getting into and mess it up.
If your main business is selling stuff that users find via your search features, then doubly so of course since you are literally losing cash every time your search ends up not doing its job. Easy to measure too and most eCommerce companies that survive long enough do that obsessively because it shows in their recurring revenue if they don't.
Also, if your competitors have awesome search and you don't, your users might realize and jump ship. If you have content that is great but nobody is finding it, you might want to fix it by allowing them to find it via better search functionality.
If search is actually not critical to your UX or product, then by all means, cut corners. Google will happily redirect users to your competitors as well. Make sure to give them plenty of money for keywords. If you don't, somebody will. Either way, your analytics will tell you how people come to your site and what they do once they get there.
Either way, it's not that hard to build a decent search experience if you know what you are doing. The key point of this article is that many engineers kind of don't know what they are getting into and mess it up.