A month max, IIRC. At the moment it's just under a week out of date:

the google

cached version of [[breakfast]], for example, is from the 29th July.

The google cached version of [[Deng Xiaoping]] on the other hand would seem to be 32 months out of date (i.e., created 21 Oct 2001, and apparently never cached by google at all, ever).

Nope. You want the "search this site" toolbar button*

This instruction should be in the null-result page, then, as most new users probably don't subscribe to the mailing list.

Or better yet, we could have a google search box there, as we did last time local search was turned off.

As it is now, if we're lucky, what happens after someone searches for "battle of hastings" (lowercase) is that they click on "Edit this page" and put a short stub in [[Battle of hastings]] which will later have to be merged, leaving a redirect that will be useless when (if?) the search function is turned back on, because the search function isn't case-sensitive.

In not-so-best case scenarios, they fill the page with junk, or click on the google link, do the same search, go to www.battle1066.com and never see Wikipedia again.

Yes my original post was sarcastic--it was meant to be. I had just read another post which seemed to actually posit that we're just as well off using google. And that simply is not the case. Getting search turned back should be the number-one coding priority (as an aside, I notice that the server quite often drags even with it off).

-Hephaestos