On 19.04.2013 01:48, Dario Taraborelli wrote:
Since you also mention improvements to search, I was wondering whether you had specific plans for work on search functionality. Unless I use the Items by title page, if type "Berlin" in a regular search form the item I am actually looking for (Q64) is ranked #34 in the search results (i.e. three clicks away on the "more" link).
The "improved search" (read: case-insensitive lookup) applies to ItemByTitle, the top-right search box suggestions, and autocompletion when entering item references.
The full text search is as broken as ever. There are two reasons for this:
a) rebuilding the imdex from a dump is simply broken for wikidata. It will cause raw JSON to be indexed, with horrible results (see bug 45983). This means that a lot of "old" items (that havn't been edited since mid february) are not indexed correctly.
b) even for stuff indexed correctly (because it's indexed by mediawiki itself), the search isn't great, because it's optimized for wikitext, relying on wikilinks etc for ranking.
I don't see a way to fix this with the current Lucene infrastructure. We have been experimenting with Solr, but as far as I know, there is no roadmap for integrating Wikibase specific Solr search with the MediaWiki search page. It's on the list, but there are no concrete plans yet.
-- daniel