The Happy Friar wrote:
never did like the way google display stuff, or their searches, so odds are i'll still use the phpbb "search" function, but nice.
Me neither, but Google has acquired a sort of reputation in building search engines

It's just an additional option which can get fine tuned later to adjust the display of search results.
The Happy Friar wrote:
possible issue: you have the "google search", then a line of text saying to visit the forums/mod wiki, then an ad. It took some searching to find that line of text because it's sandwiched between two google things. Maybe move the line, possible to a slightly bigger font, right above the new posts.
That's true and related to the fact how strangely I wrote the front end for the board a few years ago (in early 2003) and while it's still cool to see it working without an error, I didn't put enough forethought into template editing. It's html snippets all over the place.