[WikiEN-l] full-text searching since the Vector switch in en.wikipedia

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> Relatedly, a proposal!
>
> Search box, two buttons. One, "search" or "go", acts as the old
> mixed-search "go" button - it is a direct leap to that title, else
> falling back on the search. The second button is "advanced"; it takes
> the content of the search box and puts it directly into
> special:search, and then presents that along with links to Commons,
> wikisource, etc, and - prominently - the various advanced-search
> options (search project space, etc).
>
> Thoughts?
>

I like that better than some other possibilities.

If we're in a proposal mood:   Why not make it go, but if it go-es
rather than takes you to special search  put a small box of other
search results above the article. (along with your advanced button,
and an obvious close X to get rid of it if you're planning on printing
or saving the article)

So you still get the one step GO behaviour, but you also get a one
step search behaviour... and finding more advanced search controls is
never hard.

One weakness of this is that care must be taken to avoid the case
where the go works but the user misses the fact that the article they
want is on the screen. One possibility would be to preserve the go
result in the search list. Wastes a line, but if the user misses that
the result is already there it only wastes a click for them.