[WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l digest, Vol 1 #234 - 11 msgs

[A thypique]

> Message: 3
> Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 12:42:53 -0800 (PST)
> From: Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com>
> To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Search feature
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> 
> On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Anthere wrote:
> >
> > --- Daniel Ehrenberg <name12323 at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > I hate to say this, but the seach engine in
> > > Wikipedia is once again slowing
> > > down the server.  i don't think the new server
> can
> > > keep up with the high
> > > demand for seaches. Maybe we should postpone
> using
> > > it until it works
> > > completely. Or maybe we should make some
> restrictive
> > > measure for searching,
> > > like only signed in users can seach. We really
> need
> > > another server.
> >
> > Using wikipedia with the google search is really
> > painful. not all articles are found by far
> > and we are working not only for editors, also for
> > readers, who will be non loggued in most of the
> time,
> > and could have the feeling the encyclopedia is
> emptier
> > on some topics that it really is
> > What about enhanced search feature ? With some of
> the
> > articles being classified in groups ? Not all of
> them,
> > but for example, authors could be grouped in an
> author
> > list, and people could search in the author list
> > instead than in the whole encyclopedia ?
> >
> > Exactly how much is the search feature used ? And
> > what's the proportion between real articles search
> and
> > meta search ?
> >
> 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

Hi list

It seems to me the query "and" rather than "or" makes
sense. Could the search functionality be easily
improved that way ?

Yours,
Athypique


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