In the search engine, I am currently "smashing down" all 'ing' words. This
does wonders in _most_ cases, but fails miserably in some other cases. It seemed
to help, on balance, when I did it -- but the wikipedia was smaller then.
In the current case, we are looking for the page [[Conditioning]]. My technique
of chopping off the 'ing' performs poorly here.
So, I'm eliminating the 'ing' trick now. I'm still keeping the 's' trick. So
'horse' and 'horses' return exactly the same results. Someday, if we have lots
and lots of cases where that doesn't work, I'll switch back.
'ing' is a less obviously good idea, after all. It was nice to return the same results
for 'network' and 'networking'... when there wasn't much in the database, this ensured
that something marginally useful would show up.
Further clever tweaks are always possible -- but soon we will be upgrading to Magnus's
software, and the search will -- at first -- just be whatever default behavior comes
from MySQL. Perhaps that can be improved upon.
--Jimbo