As Henne mentioned, a major difference here is that it will not simply take you to a wiki page if you type in something obvious (e.g. Firefox). Depending on how you look at it, this is either a good or a bad thing. If you really are looking for the main Firefox page, the default search takes you right there, where the Google search only places it at the top of the search results. However, if you are looking for some other article dealing with Firefox, the Google search is vastly superior.
Also I have submitted a site map to Google, and they are currenty reindexing the wiki for the updated content. This should take all the dead links left over from the legacy wiki out of the Google index. This should help the Google extension come up with better results, as well as for users searching on google.com.
Last, but not least, I will also be trying out Lucene search on the staging site. I'm just waiting for an upgrade on the staging server so I can install Java 6. Once that is done, I'll start playing with it. The biggest trick will be to get it working with multiple databases, but it could be a very good option if I can get that figured out.
In the meantime, I would really like to see the Google search option worked into the theme somehow. We could replace the default search form, put another one beside it, create a link to the above-mentioned page, whatever. We just need to make it obvious, so that people can use it.
-Matt
>>> "Matthew Ehle" <mehle@novell.com> 7/28/2010 8:08 AM >>>
>It's not very fresh (google updates once a month!) it does not support
>mediawiki features (namespaces, page weighting etc) and it searches the
>resulting web pages not the wiki pages.
We could set up a sitemap and use on-demand indexing, which can get at least parts of the site indexed faster. As for the other features... is anyone really going to miss them, since the search results would be actually relevant and comprehensive? ; )
>Wikipedia has been through this already and they switched back. Maybe we
>can use google beside the normal search?
This is a reasonable suggestion. After all, OSS is all about choice, right? Thomas, would you be able to work two search boxes into the Bento theme and still make it look good?
> Well... then, you shouldn't have announced it on a public list :-(
Public or not, it is still the best way to get that information out to the people who have an interest and are able to look at it. It's better to have a few people try it out than none at all. However, I should have made it more clear that only the Novell employees can see the staging site.