Sorry for not sending an update earlier. This week has been crazy.
Anyway, we switched CirrusSearch to the primary search backend on
MediaWiki on Wednesday morning San Francisco time. Nothing is on fire
yet so the release was successful in that sense but we've filed three
new bugs so it certainly wasn't an unmitigated success.
We're probably getting to the point where we can start converting
wikis volunteered by ambassadors. We'd add CirrusSearch as a
secondary, build the index, and then we and the ambassador will do
some testing with the special URL parameter mentioned at the beginning
of this thread. When we're all confident that CirrusSearch is an
improvement over what is in production now for that wiki we'll switch
it over to primary. I'd like to start this process for a few wikis
soon. Italian Wikctionary has already been volunteered so we'll add
CirrusSearch as a secondary for it soon.
I'll be back to working full steam on bugs next week and many of the
currently open bugs are waiting on the next release of Elasticsearch
which is supposed to be "real soon" so they should fall into place
pretty quickly after we upgrade. You can always check the open bugs
here:
Nik
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:57 PM, billinghurst <billinghurst(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Is there any update on this for the wider world? If
successful, is there
a timetable for broader implementation?
thanks.
Regards billinghurst
On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 14:21:32 -0400, Nikolas Everett
<neverett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Today we threw the big lever and turned on our
new search backend at
mediawiki.org. It isn't the default yet but it is just about ready for
you
to try. Here is what is we think we've
improved:
1. Templates are now expanded during search so:
1a. You can search for text included in templates
1b. You can search for categories included in templates
2. The search engine is updated very quickly after articles change.
3. A few funky things around intitle and incategory:
3a. You can combine them with a regular query (incategory:kings
peaceful)
3b. You can use prefix searches with them
(incategory:norma*)
3c. You can use them everywhere in the query (roger incategory:normans)
What we think we've made worse and we're working on fixing:
1. Because we're expanding templates some things that probably
shouldn't
be searched are being searched. We've fixed
a few of these issues but I
wouldn't be surprised if more come up. We opened Bug 53426 regarding
audio
tags.
2. The relative weighting of matches is going to be different. We're
still fine tuning this and we'd appreciate any anecdotes describing
search
results that seem out of order.
3. We don't currently index headings beyond the article title in any
special way. We'll be fixing that soon. (Bug 53481)
4. Searching for file names or clusters of punctuation characters
doesn't
work as well as it used to. It still works
reasonably well if you
surround
your query in quotes but it isn't as good as
it was. (Bugs 53013 and
52948)
5. "Did you mean" suggestions currently aren't highlighted at all and
sometimes we'll suggest things that aren't actually better. (Bugs 52286
and
52860)
6. incategory:"category with spaces" isn't working. (Bug 53415)
What we've changed that you probably don't care about:
1. Updating search in bulk is much more slow then before. This is the
cost of expanding templates.
2. Search is now backed by a horizontally scalable search backend that
is
being actively developed (Elasticsearch) so
we're in a much better place
to
expand on the new solution as time goes on.
Neat stuff if you run your own MediaWiki:
CirrusSearch is much easier to install than our current search
infrastructure.
So what will you notice? Nothing! That is because while the new search
backend (CirrusSearch) is indexing we've left the current search
infrastructure as the default while we work on our list of bugs. You
can
see the results from CirrusSearch by performing
your search as normal
and
adding "&srbackend=CirrusSearch" to
the url parameters.
If you notice any problems with CirrusSearch please file bugs directly
for
it:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions…
Nik Everett
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