It is annoying to have to click through a "The search engine is out of service temporarily. We are working on resolving this as soon as possible." screen every time one searches PM. I could just do the search directly with Nero, and anyone with any sense can do a site search, but some people might not think of it. So maybe the search should be set up to use google whenever the native search is broken, or google should be provided as an option alongside the native search so that people can choose what service to use if they realize that the thing is broken. It would presumably be easy enough to get the query routed to google and display those results instead of showing the error page though! I assume everyone who submits a search query wants results and doesn't care too much where they come from.
--jcorneli
It is supposed to provide a Google site search if it can't contact the native search system. I'll have to look into why this isn't working. However, I don't want to make it too "smooth", because then (1) I won't hear about the search engine breaking, and (2) it won't be as important for me to fix it.
As it happens, the only reason it was down in the past few days was because someone rebooted PM without consulting me or Logan– the old search engine used to crash frequently of its own effort. I don't think the search engine going down is a frequent enough occurrence anymore to merit much attention (at least, not by me).
--akrowne Mon Jun 20 22:33:53 UTC 2005