This strikes me as a rather good idea, but I don't really know that much about cirrussearch in the first place. Anyone know, or have any thoughts on this?
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [MediaWiki-l] An "advanced search" page for CirrusSearch? Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2015 14:12:18 +0000 From: Daniel Barrett danb@cimpress.com Reply-To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org
CirrusSearch has so many wonderful keywords for advanced searching: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch.
Has anybody created an "advanced" search form (a special page) that uses these wonderful options under the hood, to help less sophisticated users? That would make a great addition to MediaWiki. For example:
Enter your search terms: Limit to category: Limit to namespace: (dropdown) Search page titles only (yes/no): Approximate matching (on/off): Search within wikitext source (on/off): etc...
I looked on mediawiki.org but didn't see anything.
Thanks, DanB
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I once tried doing something like that in js. But for the use case I was trying to do, it was very limited by a bug in Cirrus where you can't OR operators with incategory:. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-ad...
See also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T23988
-- -bawolff On 10/5/15, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
This strikes me as a rather good idea, but I don't really know that much about cirrussearch in the first place. Anyone know, or have any thoughts on this?
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [MediaWiki-l] An "advanced search" page for CirrusSearch? Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2015 14:12:18 +0000 From: Daniel Barrett danb@cimpress.com Reply-To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org
CirrusSearch has so many wonderful keywords for advanced searching: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch.
Has anybody created an "advanced" search form (a special page) that uses these wonderful options under the hood, to help less sophisticated users? That would make a great addition to MediaWiki. For example:
Enter your search terms: Limit to category: Limit to namespace: (dropdown) Search page titles only (yes/no): Approximate matching (on/off): Search within wikitext source (on/off): etc...
I looked on mediawiki.org but didn't see anything.
Thanks, DanB
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Brian Wolff wrote:
This is a rare case where I think we could potentially take a lesson from Gerrit's user interface: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T103637.
It also seems worthwhile to note that "Special:Search" already has an advanced profile/tab where users can select arbitrary namespaces to search.
MZMcBride
MZMcBride writes:
It also seems worthwhile to note that "Special:Search" already has an advanced profile/tab where users can select arbitrary namespaces to search.
Technically that is true, but I suspect that 95% of the time, 95% of users care only about the main namespace. Filter by category, wildcard searches, title searches, fuzzy searches, etc., are eminently more usable. I'll probably build an advanced search plugin myself if nobody else has done it yet.
DanB
On 06/10/15 17:12, Daniel Barrett wrote:
MZMcBride writes:
It also seems worthwhile to note that "Special:Search" already has an advanced profile/tab where users can select arbitrary namespaces to search.
Technically that is true, but I suspect that 95% of the time, 95% of users care only about the main namespace. Filter by category, wildcard searches, title searches, fuzzy searches, etc., are eminently more usable. I'll probably build an advanced search plugin myself if nobody else has done it yet.
DanB
This is an important point. Namespace searching by itself really feels like a much more ham-fisted approach to a lot of this, for when lacking anything more elegant to narrow things down (not that it's not useful too). But we do have elegant now, and yet nobody sees it.
I've thought several times before that CirrusSearch has plenty of advanced syntax, and almost no-one knows about they exist. We added a help link to Special:Search but this help link is per wiki, and I don't think any of the wikis Help:Searching pages even includes the cirrus syntax. On enwiki at least mw:Help:CirrusSearch is linked (at the very very bottom) which might allow a perseverant wikipedian to find them, much more could be done though.
This would be interesting to work on, but I don't expect Discovery will find time to investigate this for Q2. For the current quarter Discovery is focusing its efforts towards fixing the search results you get with a plain query that contains no special syntax. The search results are just not nearly as relevant as they can be.
I'm certain I could find time to review anything put together for this though. Off the top of my head I would probably start by adjusting how the autocompleter works, having it know the various prefixes available and include them in the autocomplete drop down. Thats just a random idea from me though, it seems there are plenty of other ideas to go around. If anyone from the community plans to work on this just add me to the related gerrit patch or phabricator ticket and I'll try and help you move it along.
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 7:53 PM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/10/15 17:12, Daniel Barrett wrote:
MZMcBride writes:
It also seems worthwhile to note that "Special:Search" already has an advanced profile/tab where users can select arbitrary namespaces to search.
Technically that is true, but I suspect that 95% of the time, 95% of users care only about the main namespace. Filter by category, wildcard searches, title searches, fuzzy searches, etc., are eminently more usable. I'll probably build an advanced search plugin myself if nobody else has done it yet.
DanB
This is an important point. Namespace searching by itself really feels like a much more ham-fisted approach to a lot of this, for when lacking anything more elegant to narrow things down (not that it's not useful too). But we do have elegant now, and yet nobody sees it.
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With my Search team hat on, I really love this idea. It'd be great to pair it with a simplification of the 'usual' search interface - I share Isarra's feelings on namespace search being pretty ham-fisted, and as time gets on find the many-element tickboxes that control it a painful UI element.
On 13 October 2015 at 02:24, Erik Bernhardson ebernhardson@wikimedia.org wrote:
I've thought several times before that CirrusSearch has plenty of advanced syntax, and almost no-one knows about they exist. We added a help link to Special:Search but this help link is per wiki, and I don't think any of the wikis Help:Searching pages even includes the cirrus syntax. On enwiki at least mw:Help:CirrusSearch is linked (at the very very bottom) which might allow a perseverant wikipedian to find them, much more could be done though.
This would be interesting to work on, but I don't expect Discovery will find time to investigate this for Q2. For the current quarter Discovery is focusing its efforts towards fixing the search results you get with a plain query that contains no special syntax. The search results are just not nearly as relevant as they can be.
I'm certain I could find time to review anything put together for this though. Off the top of my head I would probably start by adjusting how the autocompleter works, having it know the various prefixes available and include them in the autocomplete drop down. Thats just a random idea from me though, it seems there are plenty of other ideas to go around. If anyone from the community plans to work on this just add me to the related gerrit patch or phabricator ticket and I'll try and help you move it along.
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 7:53 PM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/10/15 17:12, Daniel Barrett wrote:
MZMcBride writes:
It also seems worthwhile to note that "Special:Search" already has an advanced profile/tab where users can select arbitrary namespaces to search.
Technically that is true, but I suspect that 95% of the time, 95% of users care only about the main namespace. Filter by category, wildcard searches, title searches, fuzzy searches, etc., are eminently more usable. I'll probably build an advanced search plugin myself if nobody else has done it yet.
DanB
This is an important point. Namespace searching by itself really feels like a much more ham-fisted approach to a lot of this, for when lacking anything more elegant to narrow things down (not that it's not useful too). But we do have elegant now, and yet nobody sees it.
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On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 11:24 PM, Erik Bernhardson < ebernhardson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
We added a help link to Special:Search https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Cool! It's blank on mediawiki.org , it seems just an admin decision to add MediaWiki:search-summary on mw.org that links to [[Special:MyLanguage/Help:CirrusSearch]]
I filed https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T115429 for Special:Search to use the standard addHelpLink() indicator for this help.
It seems a search expression builder would be hard unless it really knows the exact syntax and escaping rules that the Cirrus back-end supports, but a helper that inserts the prefixes could work.
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