If you're also on wikitech-l, you may have seen the recent announcement[1]
of some work by WMF's Discovery team to improve the search results popped
up by the search box in wiki pages. Assuming it continues to receive
positive feedback, it's rather likely that the code behind their temporary
"action=cirrus-suggest" API module will become the backing engine behind
action=opensearch and list=prefixsearch.
This brought to my attention that "list=prefixsearch" has never been
particularly well-documented, so Gerrit change 260383[2] was submitted and
merged to clarify the issue. Note this isn't a change in behavior, it's a
clarification of the existing behavior to avoid future confusion when that
behavior is improved.
ApiQueryPrefixSearch was added in Gerrit change 123118[3] to be like
action=opensearch but usable as a generator. If your client code is using
list=prefixsearch in the expectation that it would work like the
similarly-named web UI page Special:PrefixIndex, you should review your
usage to make sure that it is actually behaving as you intend. If you are
really wanting a list of titles with a prefix rather than a *search* for
pages "matching" a prefix in some loosely-defined sense, you should be
using list=allpages with the apprefix parameter instead.
[1]:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-December/084356.html
[2]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/260383/
[3]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/123118/
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation