Hi,
Please change the test for "MediaWiki:Nonefound" in the default installation from:
'''Note''': unsuccessful searches are often caused by searching for common words like "have" and "from", which are not indexed, or by specifying more than one search term (only pages containing all of the search terms will appear in the result).
to:
'''Note''': unsuccessful searches are often caused by searching for words shorter then 4 characters, or common words like "have" and "from", which are not indexed, or by specifying more than one search term (only pages containing all of the search terms will appear in the result).
I just spend quite some time figuring out why a search on "IP" did not match a page, while I was sure I had a page on "IP Address ranges".
Obviously, this is a MySQL-specific problem (which only indexes words of 4 chars and up [1]), but I have the impression I'm not the only one who encountered this "feature" of MySQL.
Alternatively, it is very well possible to make a workaround, and recognize the fact that search with a short word is performed by MySQL, but I dislike such a feature, so I propose a generic warning instead, and just hope that MySQL makes it easier to change the min-word-length on a per-table (or per-column or per-database) rather then a per-server basis.
Regards, Freek Dijkstra
[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-search.html "Some words are ignored in full-text searches: Any word that is too short is ignored. The default minimum length of words that are found by full-text searches is four characters. [...]"
PS: I put the misleading "(in caps)" in the subject because I suspected this was a case-related bug (somehow all my short words were all caps ;-) ); perhaps people will earlier spot this mail when they Google for this quirck.
Freek Dijkstra wrote:
I just spend quite some time figuring out why a search on "IP" did not match a page, while I was sure I had a page on "IP Address ranges".
Read the FAQ please.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
I just spend quite some time figuring out why a search on "IP" did not match a page, while I was sure I had a page on "IP Address ranges".
Read the FAQ please.
Thanks, but the FAQ did not contain any new information.
I'm still suggesting to change the text of MediaWiki:Nonefound for a default installation (I'm aware change it myself, and did so -- I just hope that such a small change will prevent more people for sleepless nights about this "feature" :-) ).
By the way, though I did not mention that in my original mail, I am highly interested in work-arounds in PHP, even at a significant performance cost. My wiki is running on a production server, and I can't change the setting (this MySQL feature seems very immature at the time).
Regards, Freek
PS: Thanks that you pointed me at FAQ though -- I didn't realize there was one. The mediawiki site is still rather confusing to me; I seem to often end up on meta.wikimedia.org, while that seem to contain a lot of outdated information; I suggested on a talk page to make a prominent link to www.mediawiki.org on meta.wikimedia.org, but that has not been done yet.
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