Hey all,
In the continued quest to make the search bar a better tool, the Wikimedia
Foundation's Discovery Department
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery> has put a completion
suggester into Beta Features. The tool functions with search-as-you-type,
with a small tolerance for typos and spacing in finding results. Possible
matches are then displayed as you type in a drop down menu, hopefully
eliminating the need to perform a fulltext search with landing page and
all. You can read more details at
mediawiki.org
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester>
and use the talk page for now for feedback.
The tool is now available and will only be enabled for the article
namespace for now, and will progress into full production at some point
hopefully in early 2016, depending on feedback. It's going to be important
to get feedback from regular contributors who use search to make sure that
any of the basic feature requests for searching the main space can at least
be addressed while in Beta Features.
Thanks!
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation