Hi all,
We now have english wikipedia fully migrated to new servers / new search
backend. We cannot fully migrate other wikis until we resolve some hardware
issues. In the meantime, here is the overview of new features now deployed
on en.wiki:
1) Did you mean... - we now have search suggestions. Care has been taken to
provide suggestions that are context-sensitive, i.e. on phrases, proper
names, etc..
2) fuzzy and wildcard queries - a word can be made fuzzy by adding ~ to it's
end, e.g. query sarah~ thompson~ will give all different spellings and
similar names to sarah thompson. Wildcards can now be prefix and suffix,
e.g. *stan will give various countries in central asia.
3) prefix: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to pages
beginning with certain prefix. E.g.
mwsuggest prefix:Wikipedia:Village Pump
will search all village pumps and archives for mwsuggest. This should be
especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or
searchbox
4) intitle: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to titles only
5) generally improved quality of search results via usage of related
articles (based on co-occurrence of links), anchor text, text abstracts,
proximity within articles, sections, redirects, improved stemming and such
Cheers, Robert