Translations:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/7/en

Why haven't we done this already?
Why not have one giant index to search across all projects in all languages?
 * Technical complexity is one reason: the size of the resulting index would be in the hundreds of gigabytes. For example, the English Wikipedia database index of all article pages is around 200 gigabytes. Providing timely search results would be negatively impacted having just one massive database index.
 * Another reason for this 'one language' search results approach is that it probably wouldn't be very useful to search for a topic across all languages. Searching for "Paris, France" and seeing generally the same article in French, German, and English wouldn't help very much in discovering new information.