Brion wrote:
So why are we talking about this? Google isn't going to vanish from the web because we get the internal search back online.
Yeah but the link to the Google search form may disappear from Wikipedia once the in-house search is re-enabled. I find the Wikipedia Google search to be rather powerful for serious data mining where up to the minute article data is not needed. So I guess I'm advocating for a "Search {ProjectName} from Google" radio button right under the MediaWiki search form. The default of the toggle would be to use MediaWiki's own search functionality so long as the database server isn't bogged down.
Giving people the option of live database search and Googlesearch should reduce database server load as well (I always felt guilty using the Wikipedia search before but was still too lazy to visit my user page to click on my own link to the Wikipedia search form on Google. ).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)