Brion Vibber wrote:
Our search engine desperately needs retooling.
This is a welcome innitiative.
Other things to think about:
1. Stopwords. Can we just get rid of the damn stopwords and search
anything?
A very few may still need to be there, but with the opportunity to override.
2. "Title results" vs "Text
results" - this two-prong approach is, I
think, rather confusing. We could have a single search index field with
the title text weighted more heavily (by repetition?), and just give a
single set of results.
I believe in options. Perhaps a checkbox if one only wants to look for
titles. A 'titles only' search will naturally be much faster, and may
be all that is needed.
3. Text extracts: these show the raw wikicode, and
often include language
links, HTML code, etc. Yuck! If we can strip these, that might be good.
For the general search I agree. Still an opt-in to all that is very
helpful when we are looking for things to edit.
4. Character entities: should be folded to their raw
equivalents in the
search index, so searching a page containing "Schrödinger" and one
containing "Schrödinger" gives identical results.
Also "Schrodinger" without an umlaut, etc..
5. 'Power search' is perhaps a little
confusing, and there's currently no
way to get to it short of doing two searches.
I guess I'm just one of those luddites that's never distinguished
between a search and a power search.
6. 'Search' and 'go' buttons are not
clearly demarcated; several people
have noted confusion. Better labelling or better arrangement is needed.
7. Redirects. We generally want to filter out redirects that seem
duplicative of other things already listed, but *must* show them for
alternate names. Clearer labeling of redirects would help as well.
See my answer to 3.
Eclecticology