Matt England wrote:
I have come to form the impression that MediaWiki's full-page-text capability is poor. I have inserted various words at my 1.4.0 site, meta.wikimedia.org, and en.wikipedia.org, and have found similar problems on all the sites. Depending on how and where I place the same text, searches will find the text (at least on my site), and if I take the same text and put it in a different position on the same page, the text is not found in a search.
For what it's worth, text edits to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox were not found in a search (I also put stuff in http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sandbox with the same results). I made a very unique text string did not result in a search hit on *any* page.
The Wikimedia sites are using a completely different search engine. At the moment a full rebuild of the search index is being made and changes will not immediately be reflected.
This is completely unrelated to the MySQL fulltext search engine backend used by default on MediaWiki, which should update immediately (with various caveats).
If you are having problems with it, please check the index by running the search queries manually and ensure it is properly set up.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)