metadata for site searches

[Luck, Deanne]

We are in the midst of a total redesign of our web site, and I want to
include a "search this site" feature, which we've never had before.  I often
find searches on other sites to be very unhelpful due to either the display
of the results or the fact that it's searching the full text and returns too
much.  I am looking into assigning metadata keywords to our pages, and by
default only searching those keywords.  My questions for anyone who has done
this or has thought about it are:  Is it worth the trouble to assign the
keywords, or is it almost as useful just to have descriptive titles?  If so,
how many keywords should be assigned to each page?  Should we develop a
controlled vocabulary?

Also, what are the best packages to use for both search options and a good
results display?  Is SWISH-E far and away the best?  We are running IIS on
an NT machine.

Thanks,
DeAnne Luck
Electronic Resources Librarian
Austin Peay State University
LuckDL at apsu.edu