[Mediawiki-l] mwsuggest misses imported articles?

[Daniel Barrett]

After using Special:Import to import about 200 articles, I discovered that none of these articles appear in search results. For example, if an imported article is titled "Banana milkshake", and you search for "Banana", the Page Title Matches do NOT include "Banana milkshake." Additionally, the AJAX auto-suggest feature (mwsuggest) does not display "Banana milkshake" when you type "Banana milk".

I was able to fix the search problem by running maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php and bouncing mysqld and httpd. However, it did not fix the mwsuggest problem. Neither did maintenance/updateSearchIndex.php, nor extensions/TitleKey/rebuildTitleKeys.php.

Then, on a whim, I tried maintenance/rebuildrecentchanges.php.  And voila, mwsuggest is fixed.

Can anyone explain why this worked?
Is there a better way to update mwsuggest without wiping my recentchanges table (and all its valuable patrolling information)?

This is MediaWiki 1.14.  Thanks.

DanB