On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:
--- Daniel Ehrenberg <name12323(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
I hate to say this, but the seach engine in
Wikipedia is once again slowing
down the server. i don't think the new server can
keep up with the high
demand for seaches. Maybe we should postpone using
it until it works
completely. Or maybe we should make some restrictive
measure for searching,
like only signed in users can seach. We really need
another server.
Using wikipedia with the google search is really
painful. not all articles are found by far
and we are working not only for editors, also for
readers, who will be non loggued in most of the time,
and could have the feeling the encyclopedia is emptier
on some topics that it really is
What about enhanced search feature ? With some of the
articles being classified in groups ? Not all of them,
but for example, authors could be grouped in an author
list, and people could search in the author list
instead than in the whole encyclopedia ?
Exactly how much is the search feature used ? And
what's the proportion between real articles search and
meta search ?
One way the search engine could be improved on is if
by default it does a logical "and" search, rather than
the logical "or" search it appears to do now. To provide
an example of what I'm talking about, the other night I needed
to know who wrote the novel "Red Harvest," so I did a
search on Wikipedia using those two words. What the
search engine did was return all of the articles with
the words "red" or "harvest" in either the title or the
body of the article.
After glancing through the first hundred hits, I gave up on
Wikipedia, & used Amazon's search engine. The book was the
first or second on the list.
Although I'm not a database programmer (although I've taken
a couple of classes on Oracle & SQL in the past), I'd guess
that it's not that much of a performance hit to have the
search query first treat the input as an "and" statement,
then if nothing is returned, say in the subject head, then
offer to rerun the query as an "or" statement.
Just my two cents.
Geoff