Message: 3 Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 12:42:53 -0800 (PST) From: Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Search feature Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org

On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:

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--- Daniel Ehrenberg name12323@hotmail.com

wrote:

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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

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keep up with the high demand for seaches. Maybe we should postpone

using

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it until it works completely. Or maybe we should make some

restrictive

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measure for searching, like only signed in users can seach. We really

need

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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

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on some topics that it really is What about enhanced search feature ? With some of

the

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articles being classified in groups ? Not all of

them,

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but for example, authors could be grouped in an

author

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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

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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

Hi list

It seems to me the query "and" rather than "or" makes sense. Could the search functionality be easily improved that way ?

Yours, Athypique

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