On 6/8/15, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Do you use our search API? If so, I'd like to hear from you!
The Discovery Department https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Discovery at the Wikimedia Foundation is tasked with building a path of discovery to relevant and trusted knowledge. In line with that, one of our primary responsibilities is to ensure that our search APIs are stable, fast, and easy to use. We'd love to hear from the people that are using our APIs, so we can learn what you love about them, what frustrates you, and what we can do to improve them for you.
I'd prefer that you keep the comments about the API itself rather than the relevance of the results it returns; I plan to start a separate thread about the result relevance, since they're separate topics.
If you have some feedback, please reply in this thread or reach out to me privately.
Thanks!
Dan
-- Dan Garry Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
The search api (by which I mean query=search in api.php) is somewhat poorly documented. You have to dig to find https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch . I would much prefer that the relavent documentation was including in the normal api.php auto-generated help. Even better would be if that api allowed users to specify the options using normal url parameters, (as a separate options from using operators in the search string). Its also not entirely the most clear from the api that the search options differ depending on which extensions you have installed.
Additionally, from the help page, its not entirely clear about some of the limitations. e.g. You can't do incategory:Foo OR intitle:bar. regexes on intitle don't seem to work over the whole title, only word level tokens (I think, maybe? I'm a bit unclear on how the regex operator works).
Cheers, Brian