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