Steve Bennett wrote:
Just wondering what the story with the search
functionality is
exactly. My biggest concern is that searches for the exact title of an
existing (but "recently" created articles) fail.
Search engines don't update their search index live with every new item.
The problem with Wikipedia is its size and the quick changes. Normally
you would generate a new index every week or night - and to generate a
search index for millions of records takes hours! A powerful MediaWiki
search engine with a time lag of 1 to 2 days would also be fine for me -
you could also think of a smart search engine that works on an old dump
in the first run and checks on the live database in the second.
This is what I wrote about it last year:
http://wm.sieheauch.de/?p=4
With this sketch of a special search engine for MediaWiki:
http://wm.sieheauch.de/files/MediaWikiSearchEngine.html
To get such a powerful search it's better to build it from the scratch
in an independent application instead of coding it into MediaWiki (but
I'm no MediaWiki developer so I may be wrong) so you can optimize for
searching only.
I understand that searching is a difficult problem
best left to
Google, but is there a way where it could at least be hacked to check
for articles whose name matches the search string verbatim?
How about about a title search?
SELECT page_id FROM page WHERE page_title RLIKE $regxp AND $conditions
LIMIT $limit
It would be useful to find articles named "FOO (BAR)", "List of FOO"
etc.
Greetings,
Jakob