[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] search server migration

[David Gerard]

FYI. The devs have been working quite hard on making the internal
search not suck, and helpful feedback would probably be quite
welcomed.


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Stojnic <rainmansr at gmail.com>
Date: 2008/10/19
Subject: [Wikitech-l] search server migration
To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org


Hi all,

As some of you noticed, there are some new features on enwiki search page.
We are in progress of migrating all of our internal search to lucene-search
2.1 running on our brand-new&shiny search cluster. Since not all of the new
servers could be racked at once, we are unracking old ones, and putting new
ones in. As a result, enwiki moved to new cluster, alongside with partially
dewiki, frwiki and jawiki. Others are still on the old cluster.

Two new features to notice on enwiki are:
1) text snippets are now internally handled by lucene-search, which means
more intelligent snippet extraction, and also detection of matches to
redirects and sections.
2) interwiki matches. When a query matches a title from a sister project in
same language, a box on right appears holding the link to the sister project
page. So, for enwiki, a search matching a enwiktionary page will also appear
on the search page. The captions for different projects can be more
intelligent by tunning MediaWiki:search-interwiki-custom. For instance, for
enwiki it could be (format is interwiki:caption per line):
wikt:Wiktionary word definitions
n:Wikinews news results
..

The search should also hopefully give better ranked results than before.
There will be more new features coming up when we update rest of the
software, including the MWSearch plugin used to fetch results from the
search servers. I'll try to keep the community updated as new stuff comes up
and hopefully in few weeks time we will finish the whole migration.

Cheers, Robert
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