Joseph Sak wrote
Now we're going to have a ton of new web sites out there built by people who don't know this is a usability issue, with this option enabled on their search boxes.
With apologies to Jakob Nielsen, he is often proved wrong with his "rules." A decade ago everyone suddenly revamped their web sites to meet the "3 click rule" which isn't even an option in most sites now. Users have an amazing ability to decide what they like on their own.
That said, your point above is likely the real issue. The web/site option is easily turned off, and there's no requirement to use the DNN search functions to begin with. There are many reasons the DNN search is poor, but the major one is it does a simple database search, assuming anything outside the database really isn't wanted. That was probably the case in simple DNN sites in the beginning, but there's no reason to store 100,000 PDF files in the database when the file system works fine, and searching a PDF in the database is problematic at best.
There is a technology that works fine for searching DNN sites, and it's to use an outside search that spiders the site. Google is the natural choice for many, but not the only choice. A move by DNN to incorporate a database search and a file-based search might work, ala SharePoint, or better is a search engine that can spider the site.
Jeff