[Mediawiki-l] Making search "and" by default

[Monahon, Peter B.]

> > Earlier: ... Default mediawiki search is 
> > really bad. You should use a search
> > extension, like Lucene...

> Response: ... Since those are difficult to 
> set up at the best of times and impossible
> for most shared hosts, it might help if 
> you instead listed out the things that are 
> "really bad" about it so they can be fixed 
> for the default install... Offhand, the split 
> between title and text searches is a bit 
> odd, but the only really "bad" thing is 
> that MySQL's search engine by default
> excludes short and common words...
> Can you think of any other problems?

Peter Blaise responds: Me thinks there is equivalence between a
non-specific comment like "difficult to set up at the best of times" and
a non-specific comment like "default mediawiki search is really bad".
We're all pretty much equally challenged to present what we think we
know well in a written form others can easily access. 

----

	Anyway, regarding "...MySQL's search engine by default excludes
short...words", from 

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:Configuration_settings#using_s
earch_for_a_3_letter_word  

I put the following in 

	x:\...\mysql5\my.ini

	[mysqld]
	ft_min_word_len=2
	[myisamchk]
	ft_min_word_len=2
	## NEW for 2-letter searching, even 2-character words should be 
	## searchable - rebuild the text index by running (in DOS):
	## C:\...mediawiki\maintenance\>_ php
maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php [Enter]

	.... and, of course, ran php maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php

----

	But, regarding "...MySQL's search engine by default
excludes...common words..." YOU'RE RIGHT!  A search for the words "the"
and "an" not only didn't produce a search result, but also revealed that


	Search in namespaces: 
	[  ] List redirects

	... is NOT pre-selectable in Special:Preferences / My
Preferences!

	I'm just saying.