Dear Ambassadors,

* CirrusSearch indexes articles within a few seconds of when they are changed.  Articles that contain a changed template take longer but they are also updated.

* Most of the special search syntax is the same.  You can read the syntax here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search/CirrusSearchFeatures

What it means to volunteer:
If you volunteer your wiki we'll turn CirrusSearch on in "secondary" mode where it'll keep itself up to date but all queries will still go through the old search.  You'll be able to get search results from the new search engine for comparison by adding a url parameter to the search results page.  If you and the community that you represent aren't immediately blown away by how much better it works we'll work with you to make it awesome.

At some point, shortly after the new search has been deemed awesome, we'll switch CirrusSearch to "primary" mode and all queries will go through it.  You'll be able to get at the old search results with a url parameter similar to the one that you used to test CirrusSearch.  If anything goes wrong we'll switch you back to the old search.  We'll keep that option open for a few months.

So who is ready to help make search better?

Nik Everett

[1]: Some languages (20ish) will see a huge improvement because CirrusSearch understands their grammar and old search doesn't.  Many other languages will see an improvement because CirrusSearch is happy to search all kinds of character sets while the current search isn't.  Esperanto is very well supported by the old search so would get worse.  eo wikis should probably wait until we've improved support.