Hi,
Nik Everett added a lot of information about future CirrusSearch changes to
the next edition of Tech News (#26, due to be sent on Monday). (Thank you,
Nik :)
We can't include all of it in the newsletter, so below is the original text
with all the details. The newsletter will point to this email for further
information.
_______________________________________________________________
- CirrusSearch updates (with 1.24wmf10)
- Categories will now be considered in result ranking which should
improve results
- We took a shortcut to get this deployed (much) more quickly and
the consequences are that the incategory operator won't work
for up to 24
hours after the deployment. We'll make this time as short as
possible. If
this is going to be a horrible pain then file a bug
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=CirrusSearch>
against
Cirrus with the wiki you work on. We can either prioritize
your wiki so the
outage is very small or, if its a big enough deal, come up with a
workaround.
- Text from the lead paragraph in the article will be given a boost
when ranking results which should also improve results
- This will take some time to roll onto the wikis after wmf10
because the index will have to be rebuilt. Days, likely.
- I don't imagine this'll have any impact on wiktionary and
commons but file a bug
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=CirrusSearch>
against
Cirrus if it seems like it has a negative impact on results
- We're on track to add support for searching in article source
including regular expressions. See [the documentation
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch#insource:>] for
more.
- Like the lead paragraph the article source will take some time
to roll into the index after the deployment.
- Right now we haven't implemented snippet extraction from article
source searches. You'll only get snippets back from the regular search
terms. If you don't have any regular search terms you'll get
back a snippet
from the beginning of the article. I know this isn't ideal at
all, and its
on the list of things to fix.
- We'll cut all wikis over to a new snippet extractor
- You should only notice improvements in the snippets generated
but if you see any trouble file a bug
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=CirrusSearch>
against
Cirrus
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation