2013/10/18 Nikolas Everett neverett@wikimedia.org:
Short answer: it's going to but doesn't yet. I'd love to know more about _exactly_ what you mean.
Thanks for your answer.
On ro.wp we have articles about both the communes and the villages in those communes. The commune often has the name of the main village and it's possible to have several communes with the same name in different counties, so we'll have articles like "Bucșani, Giurgiu", "Bucșani, Dâmbovița", "Comuna Bucșani, Giurgiu", "Comuna Bucșani, Dâmbovița". If I search for "Bucș" I get the first 2 articles, but not the latter two.
Long answer:
A version of this feature was requested by someone beta testing CirrusSearch on their private wiki. I implemented it as an option turned off by default and off on all WMF wikis but my implementation feels too liberal so I'm sitting on it until I can get an update on exactly what the requester wants. Currently "main p", "page m" "ma pa", "m p", and "p m" all match "Main Page". I'm not sure if that is the right way to do it but you can see how it does fulfil your request when you ask it in the way that you did. Another way to think of it is that "page", "main p", "mai", "m", and "p" should all match "Main Page" but "page m", "m p", and "p m" should not.
The last version sound right to me. While google-like inversions would allow far more flexibility, they wouldn't bring much value in the suggestion box, as the number of results is limited. Perhaps enable the inversions only in the results page and place them at the end?
There is also the question of how this should be enabled. Should it be changed per wiki? Should it be a user configuration setting? If it is a user configuration setting should its default be configured per wiki? Should it be accessible via some magic prefix typed into the box like "~" does now? Should the prefix invert the default? For the beta tester I was going to add it as a wiki wide setting because the suited his needs.
Disabled (by default) user config would probably be best. This is an advanced feature and not all users would need it. I'm not sure about the performance impact if enabled on the wmf cluster though.
I've added Dan Garry to this particular reply because he is the WMF Product Manager who is managing this search replacement who might be able to help sort this out.
Nik
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Nikolas,
One of the grievances I have with the current search system is that it's incapable of offering suggestions with matches in the middle of the title (e.g. when searching for "X", also find "County X (some other words)" if such an article exist). Is CirrusSearch capable of this?
Thanks, Strainu
2013/10/17 Nikolas Everett neverett@wikimedia.org:
Dear Ambassadors,
I'm looking for volunteer wikis to try out the new search that Chad and I've been working on called CirrusSearch.
<sales pitch>Be a part of the second wave of wikis and influence new search features!</sales pitch>
Reality:
- We're reasonably sure CirrusSearch's language support is better than
the current search. [1]
- CirrusSearch indexes expanded templates.
- CirrusSearch indexes articles within a few seconds of when they are
changed. Articles that contain a changed template take longer but they are also updated.
- Most of the special search syntax is the same. You can read the
syntax here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search/CirrusSearchFeatures
What it means to volunteer: If you volunteer your wiki we'll turn CirrusSearch on in "secondary" mode where it'll keep itself up to date but all queries will still go through the old search. You'll be able to get search results from the new search engine for comparison by adding a url parameter to the search results page. If you and the community that you represent aren't immediately blown away by how much better it works we'll work with you to make it awesome.
At some point, shortly after the new search has been deemed awesome, we'll switch CirrusSearch to "primary" mode and all queries will go through it. You'll be able to get at the old search results with a url parameter similar to the one that you used to test CirrusSearch. If anything goes wrong we'll switch you back to the old search. We'll keep that option open for a few months.
So who is ready to help make search better?
Nik Everett
[1]: Some languages (20ish) will see a huge improvement because CirrusSearch understands their grammar and old search doesn't. Many other languages will see an improvement because CirrusSearch is happy to search all kinds of character sets while the current search isn't. Esperanto is very well supported by the old search so would get worse. eo wikis should probably wait until we've improved support.
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