On 25/09/2007, Maury Markowitz maury.markowitz@gmail.com wrote:
Out of curiosity, what is the reason we just don't use Google (or such)? The search capabilities in en.wiki are almost completely useless, IMHO, it can't even find articles with identical names if the capitalization is wrong, and it completely lacks anything like spell checking or reasonable relevance rankling. In order to find articles on en.wiki, I invariably open a second browser to search in, and this strikes me as rather sub-optimal. Is there anything I can do about this at "my end"?
I'm delighted to hear that all the excellent work that's been put into developing Lucene Search for Wikipedia as of late, as well as the ongoing work, is so easily characterised as pointless, or perhaps you haven't tried searching for anything lately - it's getting better.
We don't "just use Google" because we'd like our users to remain within the same site when searching it, to avoid confusion due to an inconsistent user experience, and the only means Google would provide us with to avoid that are either too expensive to justify, or proprietary, something we're desperately committed to avoiding.
Rob Church