Brion Vibber wrote:
Our search engine desperately needs retooling.
This is a welcome innitiative.
Other things to think about:
- Stopwords. Can we just get rid of the damn stopwords and search
anything?
A very few may still need to be there, but with the opportunity to override.
- "Title results" vs "Text results" - this two-prong approach is, I
think, rather confusing. We could have a single search index field with the title text weighted more heavily (by repetition?), and just give a single set of results.
I believe in options. Perhaps a checkbox if one only wants to look for titles. A 'titles only' search will naturally be much faster, and may be all that is needed.
- Text extracts: these show the raw wikicode, and often include language
links, HTML code, etc. Yuck! If we can strip these, that might be good.
For the general search I agree. Still an opt-in to all that is very helpful when we are looking for things to edit.
- Character entities: should be folded to their raw equivalents in the
search index, so searching a page containing "Schrödinger" and one containing "Schrödinger" gives identical results.
Also "Schrodinger" without an umlaut, etc..
- 'Power search' is perhaps a little confusing, and there's currently no
way to get to it short of doing two searches.
I guess I'm just one of those luddites that's never distinguished between a search and a power search.
- 'Search' and 'go' buttons are not clearly demarcated; several people
have noted confusion. Better labelling or better arrangement is needed.
- Redirects. We generally want to filter out redirects that seem
duplicative of other things already listed, but *must* show them for alternate names. Clearer labeling of redirects would help as well.
See my answer to 3.
Eclecticology