User blog comment:KyleH/The future of Central Wikia/@comment-961279-20100227215012

I'm going to second what Supermorff said. Since the blue boxes were removed, it's easy to get thousands of results when doing a search, and the larger wikis are going to drown out the smaller wikis. For example, I stopped counting at 25 results for "Lois Lane" on dc.wikia.com and 22 on smallville.wikia.com.

The change from the blue boxes to the cross-wiki search bar has changed the function from "find me a wiki on this topic" to "find me all possible pages on every single wiki that has this information". The search bar could provide that function again if it would group the results together, presenting the top result for a wiki and offering a link to other pages from that wiki. AltaVista does it. Bing and Yahoo try to do it but can spread out results from the same site. Google has their "similar" link, but that starts going off on tangents, too.

Right now, Special:Newwikis is more useful for this kind of search, but it has two problems. First, there's no link to it on the main Wikia page, so one one will find it unless they know to manually type in the address by hand. Second, it presents the list in reverse order with the newest wiki listed first, which gives us the opposite problem: the newer wikis are going to drown out the larger, more established wikis.