Hello,
I inserted text into the body of an existing page on my site, and then I try to search for that text sometime later, and said page does not show up in my search list. However, other, pre-existing text does show up in said page when I search for it.
This leads me to wonder:
Does MediaWiki (in my case, 1.4.0) have to build a search index every so often?
If so, when/how does it do this? (I don't see a cron anywhere...)
And if not...why would my text not show up in the search? (The text in question is "chicago", without the quotes. In my wiki page it is nice and white-space separated. I don't understand...)
-Matt
Matt England wrote:
Hello,
I inserted text into the body of an existing page on my site, and then I try to search for that text sometime later, and said page does not show up in my search list. However, other, pre-existing text does show up in said page when I search for it.
This leads me to wonder:
Does MediaWiki (in my case, 1.4.0) have to build a search index every so often?
No.
And if not...why would my text not show up in the search? (The text in question is "chicago", without the quotes. In my wiki page it is nice and white-space separated. I don't understand...)
If it's doing a LOW_PRIORITY insert, it may not be actually applying until another change comes or some other oddity. Have you tried making other changes?
Do a SHOW PROCESSLIST and look for lingering threads.
Check also if you're having a database problem that might not be showing during the redirect process, etc.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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.
So...I've just sort of given up on full-text search capability for MediaWiki...but I'm still using it as a primary tool for my intranet. I'll probably try to fill in the searching gaps with WebGlimpse, or something similar. (I wanted to install WG anyway, for I want a one-stop search place on my intranet sites that have multiple applications, like forums, wikis, blogs, etc.)
-Matt
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)
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