Adding a search box! Yes!

So over the past week I've been dealing with an issue I thought I had with the required government templates for my project. My supervisor had mentioned to me that he had been unable to get a search bar on our site so far because of some issue with the templates, he thought.

After getting to know the web team and chatting them up for a while, and assuring them I wasn't out to make their lives difficult by adding fancy design elements to the site because my focus was organization and architecture, I casually asked a quick and theoretic question--hey, if we wanted to, how hard would it be to add a search bar to the site?

My contact wrote me an email back saying she wasn't sure--in fact, they had never tried to do that before. Turns out it wasn't an issue with the templates, but with the fact that the USGS had signed a contract with Google so that they were doing all the searches on the main USGS sites. Were they also covering the smaller side sites, and was there a stipulation to the effect that all the searches needed to be run through the main pages? We had no clue. My contact said she'd have to do some research and get back to me.

As it turns out, yes, we can definitely add a search bar ("...would you like me to do a mock up for you?"). And my contact even thanked me for getting her to learn something new--we can add more than one site to the search bar; this was a concern because my site is currently under 2 domain names. However, they are merging to one as we migrate data from one to a new section on the other.

So my lesson of the day: it pays to be nice to the web team by trading strategies on simplifying 508 compliance, because they will return the favor when you ask them to go out of their way figuring out something new for you. Also, it never hurts to ask, even when you think the answer is going to be "no".