Lets fase it, the MediaWiki search is dreadful. Is is possible that we can go to Google search and embed it or somthing?
· Firefoxman wrote:
Lets fase it, the MediaWiki search is dreadful. Is is possible that we can go to Google search and embed it or somthing?
The barrier to using a solution such as Google's "search appliance" is philosophical rather than technical or financial (although those may also pose certain challenges). The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to support open source software, and Google is not open source.
What needs to happen is for a group of developers to develop a new search engine (or adapt an existing open source engine) so it can be embedded into MediaWiki.
Our expectations of what a search engine can do are set by Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
Of course, it's "impossible" for any volunteer-driven open-source project to compete with a well-funded product from a major corporation. I mean, that would be like taking on Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Office, or... hmmm... Encyclopedia Brittanica.
-Rich
Well, is there some js hack to make wikisearches automaticly go to google?
On 2/3/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
· Firefoxman wrote:
Lets fase it, the MediaWiki search is dreadful. Is is possible that we
can
go to Google search and embed it or somthing?
The barrier to using a solution such as Google's "search appliance" is philosophical rather than technical or financial (although those may also pose certain challenges). The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to support open source software, and Google is not open source.
What needs to happen is for a group of developers to develop a new search engine (or adapt an existing open source engine) so it can be embedded into MediaWiki.
Our expectations of what a search engine can do are set by Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
Of course, it's "impossible" for any volunteer-driven open-source project to compete with a well-funded product from a major corporation. I mean, that would be like taking on Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Office, or... hmmm... Encyclopedia Brittanica.
-Rich
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On 03/02/07, · Firefoxman enwpmail@gmail.com wrote:
Well, is there some js hack to make wikisearches automaticly go to google?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Henrik/sandbox/google-search
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 03/02/07, · Firefoxman enwpmail@gmail.com wrote:
Well, is there some js hack to make wikisearches automaticly go to google?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Henrik/sandbox/google-search
You might have a bit of trouble searching talk pages on de.wikipedia.org, or AfD debates on en. Crawlers are blocked for both.
-- Tim Starling
Google search wouldn't pick up orphans much either.
We should be aiming to improve our inbuilt search, rather than going back to using Google by default (yes, we did have all searches going through Google or Yahoo! for a long time there). Google's search has a number of critical flaws like inability to search for punctuation and automatic spell correction where no such correction is desired.
It would be nice to have boolean searching work on Wikipedia, but that's a topic for another mailing list entirely.
~Mark Ryan
Mark Ryan wrote:
Google search wouldn't pick up orphans much either.
We should be aiming to improve our inbuilt search, rather than going back to using Google by default (yes, we did have all searches going through Google or Yahoo! for a long time there). Google's search has a number of critical flaws like inability to search for punctuation and automatic spell correction where no such correction is desired.
It would be nice to have boolean searching work on Wikipedia, but that's a topic for another mailing list entirely.
Boolean searching is only a part of it. Editors can often need certain types of search sophistication that may not be useful to the casual reader, which is not to say that I would keep casual readers away from it. As one example, a Wiktionary editor might want to look through Wikisource or Wikiquote to look for good examples of a word's usage, or to develop a statistical analysis about the way an author uses his words.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Mark Ryan wrote:
Google search wouldn't pick up orphans much either.
We should be aiming to improve our inbuilt search, rather than going back to using Google by default (yes, we did have all searches going through Google or Yahoo! for a long time there). Google's search has a number of critical flaws like inability to search for punctuation and automatic spell correction where no such correction is desired.
It would be nice to have boolean searching work on Wikipedia, but that's a topic for another mailing list entirely.
Boolean searching is only a part of it. Editors can often need certain types of search sophistication that may not be useful to the casual reader, which is not to say that I would keep casual readers away from it. As one example, a Wiktionary editor might want to look through Wikisource or Wikiquote to look for good examples of a word's usage, or to develop a statistical analysis about the way an author uses his words.
Ec
There's still plenty to be done just to get a simple text search working:
* Higher score for unstemmed matches * Better score normalisation w.r.t. document size * Improved case folding * Accent stripping * Chinese, Japanese and Thai word segmentation or n-gram search * Better scalability
User:Rainman-sr has been talking about doing a masters thesis on this subject, so anyone who wants to work on this should talk with him first, to avoid any duplication of effort.
-- Tim Starling