Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Currently wikipedias search is its greatest (non-content) achilles heel.
[snip]
The problems with search are lack of wildcards, logical operatives
Actually both of these have been present for some time. Try them yourself:
wild*
wild OR tame
(wild OR tame) AND animal
Note that in my spot-checking, wildcards appear to have some problems when multiple namespaces are selected for search; we'll have to take a look at that.
etc. as well as evaluating significance of relusts contextually.
That's something that I believe Robert (who's been maintaining our Lucene-based search module) is working to improve.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)