Hehe, we could make it randomly pick one from an array ;)
Hm. These are the times when I am happy that I have not put much work into the search features (just polised up the whole stuff, and rewritten the setup instructions with the help of some mirror maintainers).
It also hit me as a suprise, that while Andrew's note maintanence fix was turned down becasuse it was not discussed, a search switch to alltheweb/google was done without any discussion (at least without discussion visible for the webmaster's ML). Hm, interesting...
First I have planned to note that the alltheweb/google links were without site restrictions intentionally. This would have turned out in a discussion though. The idea was that if the user was unable to find something on the site then he would probably like to search for it on ATW or Google, but on the whole web (in case of the PHPNuke forks for example, which are commonly associated with PHP).
I am not universally against this external search stuff, but a discussion would probably be able to convince me that these external engines (ATW, Yahoo Search or Google in particular) know what language a page is in. As language restriction was a near stuff on the my php.net wishlist.
Also on the topic or randomly picking a search service I would be happier to have this user selected instead [as part of My PHP.net]. But only in case a descussion comes to an end that this will replace the old htdig setup, and we can trash that code away.
BTW I am also not convinced that google or alltheweb indexes the php.net sites soo deeply that it can return as good results as a properly set up search engine. I was asking for a long time for a proper htdig setup on php.net. What was on the site was a joke of course. The index was not regenerated for months, and the htdig running was an old one, it was down several times...
I still beleive that having a search.php.net site set up with some strong search engine (eg. mnogosearch), which would have an index and would be able to handle all site searches would be better. I cannot donate any time or server resources however to set something like this up. But the whole site needs to be only indexed once, as all the mirror sites have the same content. In case someone can step up and setup a search server (Stig offered that a long time ago, but then nothing happened ;() it would be better to use that. Until then Google or some other external solution may be good, but I have some problems with it (see above).
Goba