Hello!

The Search Team is thrilled to announce that secondary search results are now available over the API. This means that automated language detection (provided by TextCat) and query forwarding can now be used by API consumers.

Here's the explanation. The Search Team's analysis of common search queries showed that there are quite a few search queries that aren't in the language of the wiki the user is on. To help alleviate this problem, and give users useful results, we added language detection and query forwarding; for example, Луковичная глава now gives the user results from the Russian Wikipedia. This is the functionality that's now available over the API, as you can see if you perform the same search over the API with the srenablerewrites parameter enabled.

The secondary results functionality was added to MediaWiki core and is extendable so that, in the future, if we (or someone else!) provide secondary results from other sources, then this functionality can be used for that. For backwards compatibility, don't add the srenablerewrites parameter and you'll continue getting the same results in the same format as before this change.

Happy querying!

Thanks,

Dan