[Wikipedia-l] Searching in new codebase

Axel Boldt axel at uni-paderborn.de
Wed Jun 12 14:53:17 UTC 2002


The search code in the new codebase behaves similar to our current
code in that it assumes an implicit AND for several search terms, and
doesn't return any results if no articles match all terms.

I wonder if this is the intuitive behavior for most users. I think
Google has conditioned people to type in as much relevant information
as possible to get better hits, and most search engines work that way.
In fact, the built-in mysql search code works that way too. Maybe we
should use it directly? That way, we could also present the results
according to relevancy (which mysql reports), rather than
alphabetically.

We would lose the boolean AND OR NOT operators, but newer versions of
mysql have substitutes: you use "+term" if you definitely want the term
in your results, and you use "-term" if you definitely don't want it.
This is almost as powerful as boolean searching.

Alternatively, we could have an "advanced search" page where you could
construct a boolean search, include/exclude specific namespaces etc.
Now that I think about it, a way to optionally search talk: and
wikipedia: would probably be desirable.

Axel



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