I am looking for an opinion on the whether to use Google custom search, Yahoo search builder or build my own for web projects (no more than 100 pages of content). If I should build my own - do you have any fast start kits you could recommend?
Many thanks Chris
I have had success using OpenSearch for my personal blog.
While working at BigCorp we used dedicated search applicances in yellow boxes, but in your case (around 100 pages) it does not make sense to take such a route.
I would suggest going with either Google Custom Search, or Yahoo Search Builder (as long as they both index your site sufficiently to provide good results).
More often than not, you'll get better results and you don't have to worry about building your own custom engine (or implementing an off the shelf/open source piece of software to do the job for you).
I've used IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition and had fantastic results with it. You are limited to a single index per implementation but it's very fast and easy to integrate with and extensible in terms of search customization. I've used it with a ASP.NET site without issue. A caveat being that it needs to be installed on the server and running as a service so it is out of the question for most shared hosting. It has the index capabilities of general search engines (pdf/html/etc) which is very nice.
Edit:
I forgot to mention that some of the reasons I liked it vs other options is that it is free and doesn't require any additional hardware, just FYI.
The main situation I see Google/Yahoo as being sub-optimal is when your site relies on up-to-the-minute results. You're at the mercy of their crawling policies/speed/etc. If that's okay (and I suspect it will be for most 100ish page sites), use them - the results will be great. If realtime results are important, you may have to bite the bullet and install something locally.
My website is not letting me use my Google Custom search using the HTML code because it says that it has unsafe tags. My wbesite is on Google and it does not even let me embed Google stuff. I think it would probably be better for you to use Yahoo.