David Gerard wrote:

I let slip at work that I know something about MediaWiki and now have been asked about a text search function that doesn't suck for another department's MediaWiki installation.

It looks like an install of 1.5b3 that someone installed and forgot about. I presume it's only got the default search that comes in the tarball - is that MySQL full-text search or Lucene?

MySQL.

If the former, does anyone have a list of better text searches and how to install them? Proprietary or semi-proprietary is not an issue as long as it's free-beer.

The MySQL search engine mostly works, but is kind of picky; the default minimum word size and stop-list kind of suck. You can adjust these things in MySQL; I believe there's a faq entry on this.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend using our Lucene-based system at this time; while it searches ok the the updating process is kind of a pain and the configuration and dependencies are finicky.

If you want the best, though, just buy yourself a Google search appliance. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)