Hi all,
As some of you noticed, there are some new features on enwiki search page. We are in progress of migrating all of our internal search to lucene-search 2.1 running on our brand-new&shiny search cluster. Since not all of the new servers could be racked at once, we are unracking old ones, and putting new ones in. As a result, enwiki moved to new cluster, alongside with partially dewiki, frwiki and jawiki. Others are still on the old cluster.
Two new features to notice on enwiki are: 1) text snippets are now internally handled by lucene-search, which means more intelligent snippet extraction, and also detection of matches to redirects and sections. 2) interwiki matches. When a query matches a title from a sister project in same language, a box on right appears holding the link to the sister project page. So, for enwiki, a search matching a enwiktionary page will also appear on the search page. The captions for different projects can be more intelligent by tunning MediaWiki:search-interwiki-custom. For instance, for enwiki it could be (format is interwiki:caption per line): wikt:Wiktionary word definitions n:Wikinews news results ..
The search should also hopefully give better ranked results than before. There will be more new features coming up when we update rest of the software, including the MWSearch plugin used to fetch results from the search servers. I'll try to keep the community updated as new stuff comes up and hopefully in few weeks time we will finish the whole migration.
Cheers, Robert