Steve Bennett wrote:
Just wondering what the story with the search functionality is exactly. My biggest concern is that searches for the exact title of an existing (but "recently" created articles) fail.
Search engines don't update their search index live with every new item. The problem with Wikipedia is its size and the quick changes. Normally you would generate a new index every week or night - and to generate a search index for millions of records takes hours! A powerful MediaWiki search engine with a time lag of 1 to 2 days would also be fine for me - you could also think of a smart search engine that works on an old dump in the first run and checks on the live database in the second.
This is what I wrote about it last year: http://wm.sieheauch.de/?p=4 With this sketch of a special search engine for MediaWiki: http://wm.sieheauch.de/files/MediaWikiSearchEngine.html
To get such a powerful search it's better to build it from the scratch in an independent application instead of coding it into MediaWiki (but I'm no MediaWiki developer so I may be wrong) so you can optimize for searching only.
I understand that searching is a difficult problem best left to Google, but is there a way where it could at least be hacked to check for articles whose name matches the search string verbatim?
How about about a title search?
SELECT page_id FROM page WHERE page_title RLIKE $regxp AND $conditions LIMIT $limit
It would be useful to find articles named "FOO (BAR)", "List of FOO" etc.
Greetings, Jakob