I understand your pain. I understand that other websites also use this hotkey for search (for instance, twitter and gmail). I'll think about this for a while.

Yes, gmail and twitter may have done so. But I think this function, in the context of php.net documentation pages, does more harm than good. 

Take the example of gmail. There is not much use for searching the text that is in page. Because the contents are short. Most often you are interested in the searching the mails themselves rather than the page contents.

But take the case of the php.net. The user has probably done the search in google and arrived at the exact documentation page in php.net. Now this page can have a lot of content. For eg, take the documentation page for cURL extension. There are a lot of flags and options in those pages. So there is a lot of content in the page itself and with out text search it will be hard to find the info user is looking for. So most of the time, the user will have to use the in-page-text search, as opposed to the actual site search. This issue is worsened by the fact that you cannot search for flag constants from the php.net's search function.

So I think the slash key should be returned to its default text search function by which it will be most useful.

No. Use a Greasemonkey script to unbind it.
I'd recommend loading it globally so you don't have to worry about other websites using it.

Respectfully, Hannes, “No” should not be the last word on this subject; the / keybinding breaks the search-in-page muscle memory for firefox, for an unclear gain… how does it help wrt searching the PHP docs?

(PS. I’d much rather have voted on an open bug and moved on than tried to revive a WONTFIX this way…)

Lack of respect for users -- bjori@php.net

What makes you think it's ok to waste the world's time - the time they spent typing in a search string, only to discover they were typing it into the php.net search box

Well, using the latest nightly branch the / quicksearch shortcut is not 'stolen', so I guess the bug is fixed for you then.

Now, as we can see, this won't ever be 'fixed' from the side of the PHP.net website, since it's not considered a bug, but rather a feature. So let's leave it at that.

I consider it a bug to interfere with people's UIs, but even if you
disagree, there's good reason to do it gracefully. Here's a gist to
show that you could easily retain the shortcut and make a concession
that improves usability:

https://gist.github.com/Roy-Orbison/34c7237527be8827ed8be56f21aa967b