Re: [Mediawiki-l] Making search "and" by default - MediaWiki-l

16 Oct 2007


...
  > Earlier: ... Default mediawiki search is 
 > really bad. You should use a search
 > extension, like Lucene... 
...
  Response: ... Since those are difficult to 
 set up at the best of times and impossible
 for most shared hosts, it might help if 
 you instead listed out the things that are 
 "really bad" about it so they can be fixed 
 for the default install... Offhand, the split 
 between title and text searches is a bit 
 odd, but the only really "bad" thing is 
 that MySQL's search engine by default
 excludes short and common words...
 Can you think of any other problems? 
Peter Blaise responds: Me thinks there is equivalence between a
non-specific comment like "difficult to set up at the best of times" and
a non-specific comment like "default mediawiki search is really bad".
We're all pretty much equally challenged to present what we think we
know well in a written form others can easily access. 

----

	Anyway, regarding "...MySQL's search engine by default excludes
short...words", from 

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Configuration_settings#using_s
earch_for_a_3_letter_word  

I put the following in 

	x:\...\mysql5\my.ini

	[mysqld]
	ft_min_word_len=2
	[myisamchk]
	ft_min_word_len=2
	## NEW for 2-letter searching, even 2-character words should be 
	## searchable - rebuild the text index by running (in DOS):
	## C:\...mediawiki\maintenance\>_ php
maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php [Enter]

	.... and, of course, ran php maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php

----

	But, regarding "...MySQL's search engine by default
excludes...common words..." YOU'RE RIGHT!  A search for the words
"the"
and "an" not only didn't produce a search result, but also revealed that


	Search in namespaces: 
	[  ] List redirects

	... is NOT pre-selectable in Special:Preferences / My
Preferences!

	I'm just saying.