It seems like there are also a bunch of hacky search-alike features built into the mediawiki database. For example, "all pages linking to this page", "my contributions", etc. From a code cleanup standpoint, it would also be worthwhile if these were all unified and brought together under a single search engine.
It would be really nice if the search engine allowed me to make these sorts of queries in a query language, so that I could combine features. "All pages which I have contributed to which link to Foo.jpg and have the word Bar in them", for example.
This would potentially simplify the codebase as well as provide a capability google.com does not. --scott