[WikiEN-l] Search feature

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

Maybe the article didn't exist.  Try typing in Red_Harvest after 
wikipedia.org/wiki/. That's what I aways do.  The page doesn't exist.  We 
need more people to write book articles. I write one after every book I read 
for school. If everyone collectively tries to avoid using the search engine, 
the server will be much faster.

>One way the search engine could be improved on is if
>by default it does a logical "and" search, rather than
>the logical "or" search it appears to do now. To provide
>an example of what I'm talking about, the other night I needed
>to know who wrote the novel "Red Harvest," so I did a
>search on Wikipedia using those two words. What the
>search engine did was return all of the articles with
>the words "red" or "harvest" in either the title or the
>body of the article.
>
>After glancing through the first hundred hits, I gave up on
>Wikipedia, & used Amazon's search engine. The book was the
>first or second on the list.
>
>Although I'm not a database programmer (although I've taken
>a couple of classes on Oracle & SQL in the past), I'd guess
>that it's not that much of a performance hit to have the
>search query first treat the input as an "and" statement,
>then if nothing is returned, say in the subject head, then
>offer to rerun the query as an "or" statement.
>
>Just my two cents.
>
>Geoff


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