I hate to say this, but the seach engine in Wikipedia is once again slowing down the server. i don't think the new server can keep up with the high demand for seaches. Maybe we should postpone using it until it works completely. Or maybe we should make some restrictive measure for searching, like only signed in users can seach. We really need another server.
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--- Daniel Ehrenberg name12323@hotmail.com wrote:
I hate to say this, but the seach engine in Wikipedia is once again slowing down the server. i don't think the new server can keep up with the high demand for seaches. Maybe we should postpone using it until it works completely. Or maybe we should make some restrictive measure for searching, like only signed in users can seach. We really need another server.
Using wikipedia with the google search is really painful. not all articles are found by far and we are working not only for editors, also for readers, who will be non loggued in most of the time, and could have the feeling the encyclopedia is emptier on some topics that it really is What about enhanced search feature ? With some of the articles being classified in groups ? Not all of them, but for example, authors could be grouped in an author list, and people could search in the author list instead than in the whole encyclopedia ?
Exactly how much is the search feature used ? And what's the proportion between real articles search and meta search ?
I'll give an example... on the french wiki, all the redirect articles about common meta.articles have been deleted, for some said they didnot belong to the encyclopedia itself.
Fine, but now, if I want to access someone talk page for example, I do a first search in all articles, then I get the more precise search box, then I give more precision saying I want to look in user page, then I do a second search, and I finally get the result. Same for any help page.
How bright is that ? Looking in the whole database first to have then the possibility to give more precision to my search. That's inefficient. Is there anything to do there ? At least an access to advanced search ? Or does that exist and I did not realise ?
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On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:
--- Daniel Ehrenberg name12323@hotmail.com wrote:
I hate to say this, but the seach engine in Wikipedia is once again slowing down the server. i don't think the new server can keep up with the high demand for seaches. Maybe we should postpone using it until it works completely. Or maybe we should make some restrictive measure for searching, like only signed in users can seach. We really need another server.
Using wikipedia with the google search is really painful. not all articles are found by far and we are working not only for editors, also for readers, who will be non loggued in most of the time, and could have the feeling the encyclopedia is emptier on some topics that it really is What about enhanced search feature ? With some of the articles being classified in groups ? Not all of them, but for example, authors could be grouped in an author list, and people could search in the author list instead than in the whole encyclopedia ?
Exactly how much is the search feature used ? And what's the proportion between real articles search and meta search ?
One way the search engine could be improved on is if by default it does a logical "and" search, rather than the logical "or" search it appears to do now. To provide an example of what I'm talking about, the other night I needed to know who wrote the novel "Red Harvest," so I did a search on Wikipedia using those two words. What the search engine did was return all of the articles with the words "red" or "harvest" in either the title or the body of the article.
After glancing through the first hundred hits, I gave up on Wikipedia, & used Amazon's search engine. The book was the first or second on the list.
Although I'm not a database programmer (although I've taken a couple of classes on Oracle & SQL in the past), I'd guess that it's not that much of a performance hit to have the search query first treat the input as an "and" statement, then if nothing is returned, say in the subject head, then offer to rerun the query as an "or" statement.
Just my two cents.
Geoff