I hear what everyone is saying, and quite agree that the Google search, whilst an awesome search engine for general web content, is not particularly suited to the task at hand. I will, at some point, once I've taken care of other scripts and things, investigate other means (again) to bring back the useful version of search.
There's two possibilities;
1) Run searches on a completely seperate machine and send the results back to the DD server. This may be a possibility in the new year - and I'll investigate it when it becomes a possibility.
2) Await the stable release of MySQL 4.0 which claims to build the fulltext indexes much faster than the 3.23 series which we're presently using.
The likelihood is that both solutions will be used, but that number 2 will happen after number 1 has happened, as I am not prepared to use alpha quality (nor beta quality) software on the live database. We have too many users now for that to be an option.
So, please (and most of you are) be patient, search will return but it may be a few more weeks.
Steve.