Last modified: 2012-02-09 22:10:34 UTC
It has recently been brought to my attention that there exist other search engines on the web besides Google, we might want to provide a search for those as well on the fallback search form, the most frequently suggested one seems to be "Yahoo!".
It should be noted that the reason I took out the Yahoo option is that it's (AFAIK) impossible to generate a search form dynamically with MediaWiki that searches a particular website with Yahoo, the reason for this is that we don't have a magic word to refer to the current IP/DNS name of the server, only the url to it. Google accepts this but Yahoo does not. We could of course get around this by just using the $wgServerName variable, however that's bad form as we're trying to eliminate any php code from the messages as they probably won't be evaluated as such in the future. The solution to this problem is: 1. Not to include a search via Yahoo. 2. Tell yahoo to fix its stupid search, it would hardly be *that* hard to add something like $searchstr =~ s#https?://## to it 3. Make a new magic word like {{SERVERNAMEWITHOUTTHEHTTPORWHATEVERPART}} 4. Use $wgServerName
(In reply to comment #1) > 3. Make a new magic word like {{SERVERNAMEWITHOUTTHEHTTPORWHATEVERPART}} Update: I've added a {{SERVERNAME}} magic word that does just that, return $wgServerName, doing something like this is now possible.
This is filed under "MediaWiki" but as far as I'm aware, no external search engines are included with a vanilla installation of MediaWiki. I will note that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search= uses JS to create a drop-down of multiple search engines, including Yahoo and Google. I'm inclined to resolve this. Thoughts?
