[QA] [Wikitech-ambassadors] New search backend live on mediawiki.org

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Awesome update.

Nikolas Everett, 28/08/2013 20:21:
> Today we threw the big lever and turned on our new search backend at
> mediawiki.org <http://mediawiki.org>.  It isn't the default yet but it
> is just about ready for you to try.  [...]
> 2.  The relative weighting of matches is going to be different.  We're
> still fine tuning this and we'd appreciate any anecdotes describing
> search results that seem out of order.

I'm not very imaginative and I have no idea what queries to test, 
especially when it comes to language-specific searches (that we probably 
be able to test some time soon on beta.wmflabs.org language subdomains?).
I know from 
<http://laxstrom.name/blag/2012/02/13/exploring-the-states-of-open-source-search-stack-supporting-finnish/> 
that it's possible to get corpuses of actual search queries. It would be 
nice to have some extract, or whatever is easy to produce, to have some 
ideas of stuff to test and improve our anecdotal assessment of the 
search results quality.
Other ideas may come from previous bugs, I guess. :S 
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&component=lucene-search-2&component=MWSearch&component=Search>

> [...]
> 6.  incategory:"category with spaces" isn't working. (Bug 53415)

Does it work on categories not directly mentioned on the page? It may 
considered an obvious yes as you are indexing expanded templates, just 
checking. (You probably want to avoid that exceptions in templates 
indexing break this feature.)

> What we've changed that you probably don't care about:
> 1.  Updating search in bulk is much more slow then before.  This is the
> cost of expanding templates.
> 2. Search is now backed by a horizontally scalable search backend that
> is being actively developed (Elasticsearch) so we're in a much better
> place to expand on the new solution as time goes on.
>
> Neat stuff if you run your own MediaWiki:
> CirrusSearch is much easier to install than our current search
> infrastructure.

Yay! :) Maybe people on mediawiki-l would like to test it too.

Nemo

>
> So what will you notice?  Nothing!  That is because while the new search
> backend (CirrusSearch) is indexing we've left the current search
> infrastructure as the default while we work on our list of bugs.  You
> can see the results from CirrusSearch by performing your search as
> normal and adding "&srbackend=CirrusSearch" to the url parameters.
>
> If you notice any problems with CirrusSearch please file bugs directly
> for it:
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=CirrusSearch
>
> Nik Everett