I have reworked the search page that is shown if you can't find something a bit and included the google search
But this is only for the meantime until we get Lucene. Lucene is what wikipedia uses and it imho has the right combination of the features of the MySQL search and Google.
That is a good start. Is there a way that we can move that higher up or make it more prominent somehow? Also, can we do the same even if we get a list of results? Even when Mediawiki finds pages, they are often very limited or poorly ranked. I like where you are going though, as it combines the strengths of the default search with that of the Google Search. As for Lucene, just remember that patience is a virtue ; ) Don't worry, I plan on getting it installed and tested on stage as soon as the server gets an upgrade. There are a few technical hurdles to overcome, but I'm confident we can make it work.
BTW can you please use another pagename for google search engine? Portal: does not really fit with our namespace policy. Can you please use Mediawiki: or Special:?
My first thought was to use Special namespace, but that would have to be programmed in the wiki software. Portal seemed to make the most sense after that, but I didn't think to use the MediaWiki namespace. Therefore, it is now under both Portal:GoogleSearch and MediaWiki:GoogleSearch. Let me know when you have made the change in the search results page, and I'll nuke Portal:GoogleSearch. -Matt