MyBB Community Forums

will my users get the same results if I dont use the MyBB search but instead use google's adsense for search?
what are your experiences?

thanks

If you use Google's search it will only search what is indexed versus MyBB's search which actually checks the database and thus is usually more accurate and provides better results if your site is not being indexed correctly or fully by Google.

A benefit to using Google search is that it uses less resources since it is using Google's servers instead of your own and with a forum with a large database the search feature can be rather resource intensive.

good points, Joe. what do you think constitutes a large database considering im using shared server hosting?

Actually a large database + an active site are the key factors (since you can have a large database while only having 1000 users on each day). The main idea is to keep the strain on the database server as low as possible. If you're on shared hosting I really don't think it matters until the hosting company informs you it's a problem or when you start getting MySQL connection/timeout errors for to many concurrent connections.

Why not allow for both search methods? Like having the link in your navbar for advanced search while having a Google search form on the site itself? I know a lot of large forums (2.5 million+ posts and 500+ online at all times) that utilize that method.

Also using the Google SEO plugin integrates the Google search form into your 404 pages.