Hello Wikimedia developers!

I've just deployed the latest batch of Phabricator updates. Normally I wouldn't write an announcement for routine upgrades, however, this update is different. This week's update includes notable improvements to Phabricator's global search functionality which I have been working on for the past week.

*Bugs Fixed:*

Several minor bugs have been resolved, most notably, longstanding bug which prevented viewing results numbered 100+ has been resolved [1].

*Better Search Results:*

There have been many small improvements to search query parsing, performance & reliability in the past few weeks. A few of these are launching today but the most visible change is a significantly improved search results page with document body highlighting[2]. This feature shows a snippet of documents with the matching search terms highlighted in bold.

Previously, Phabricator only displayed the title of each result with matching terms highlighted only if they appeared within the title. With today's release, the matching terms are highlighted from the body of the document as well and this takes advantage of an Elasticsearch feature[3] to accurately highlight the terms which actually lead to the result being included in the search result.

*Welcome to The Future:*

Some of you might be thinking that this is just too much. Such unnecessary features are just extravagant and wasteful. To that I say: why should we let advanced technologies like cascading style sheets sit idle, neglected. We can do better than a 1970s search experience. We deserve to have our search terms rendered as stylized hypertext with bold, beautiful letters and contextually accurate emphasis. We deserve modern conveniences and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that. It's the 90s[4], after all.

*Upstream Status:*

This new functionality has been submitted upstream for inclusion in Phabricator, however, as of today it remains in differential pending code review. The feature is likely to evolve further before finally making it into the upstream. It is a fairly large patch which adds a new "Engine Extension" infrastructure to phabricator.

This foundation can be used to add various enhancements to the search results views (e.g. customized views for each object type.) This also lays the foundation for resolving https://secure.phabricator.com/T8646, although that bug doesn't really affect Wikimedia's developers because we have disabled Phabricator's integrated wiki.

1. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92960 2. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T162284 3. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-reque... 4. https://vimeo.com/29455771

That's all for now, I hope you enjoy these improvements to Phabricator search experience!

Mukunda Modell Release Engineer & Phabricator Admin Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.