Message: 3
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 12:42:53 -0800 (PST)
From: Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com>
To: <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Search feature
Reply-To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:
--- Daniel Ehrenberg <name12323(a)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
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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