On Nov 29, 2013, at 10:31, "Rajko" wrote:

Wiki search does not work too often, so it would be nice to have already configured Google search as default: http://en.opensuse.org/MediaWiki:GoogleSearch

- It is proprietary

+ Google has whole a lot of people taking care of search engine improvements + It is much better guessing what user wants, ie. fuzzy search + It doesn't need restart after some update

Try this and check how relevant are results for "wiki": http://en.opensuse.org/MediaWiki:GoogleSearch?cx=013285077636246033335%3A2wluvjftece&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=UTF-8&q=wiki&sa=Search&siteurl=en.opensuse.org%2FMediaWiki%3AGoogleSearch&ref=&ss=440j97600j4

What is your opinion?

This was one of the options we looked at before going with the current solution. IIRC, it was implemented with an extension and had a lot of issues at the time. That was a few years ago, so it's certainly possible that using Google is now the better solution. As has been noted, the Lucene indices have a tendency to get corrupted and require manual intervention. Your proposed solution would certainly be easier to maintain, and it will probably give just as good or better results than Lucene (even when it's happy). I'll talk to Scott on Monday. I agree it's time to take another look at our search options.

Hi, guys, Currently this plugin is not usable for local wikis (I don't know if it's a matter of configurations or just the plugin itself). Visit: http://zh.opensuse.org/MediaWiki:GoogleSearch And search this string: 字体 It'll return "font" results on "en.opensuse.org". I don't know why Google do such translations (en.o.o may be due to configuration, but the "font" result is not). Marguerite -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-web+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-web+owner@opensuse.org

Am Freitag, 29. November 2013 schrieb Matthew Ehle:

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On Nov 29, 2013, at 10:31, "Rajko" wrote: Wiki search does not work too often, so it would be nice to have already configured Google search as default: http://en.opensuse.org/MediaWiki:GoogleSearch

I'm against it for "political" reasons - we recommend to use free software everywhere, so using google as default search would send the wrong signal ;-)

I can certainly understand the philosophical reason for staying away from Google.

Nevertheless, thanks for bringing up the topic - in the meantime I learned a bit more about Lucene.

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This was one of the options we looked at before going with the current solution. IIRC, it was implemented with an extension and had a lot of issues at the time. That was a few years ago, so it's certainly possible that using Google is now the better solution. As has been noted, the Lucene indices have a tendency to get corrupted and require manual intervention.

How often does this happen? From the mails I noticed, I'd say once or maybe twice a year, but not more.

That's correct. As it turns out, this is actually a completely different problem. Something is really broken with the search daemon, and I'm still trying to figure out what is going on. BTW: What type of breakage was it? Is it something that we can catch (and repair) automatically?

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Your proposed solution would certainly be easier to maintain, and it will probably give just as good or better results than Lucene (even when it's happy).

We might need to change the Lucene config. I know that's an often discussed story, so let me just list some bullet points - search all namespaces (and, if needed, tie up Henne because I'm sure he won't like this ;-)) - use [Namespace-Boost] in lsearch-global.conf [1] [2] to boost the namespaces that we currently search (main and portal IIRC)

The result will be that pages from main and portal namespace will still be the top-rated search results, with the (currently hidden) results from other namespaces below.

That seems reasonable. I'll let you work that out amongst yourselves, and we'll go with whatever decision you all want.

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I'll talk to Scott on Monday. I agree it's time to take another look at our search options.

While you are on it, please also ask him to - update the wiki to the latest 1.19 release - 1.19.3 is quite old, there were several security updates in the meantime - fix SimpleFeed extension (if needed, I can help - it works for me with MediaWiki 1.19, so it should also work for the openSUSE wiki ;-) - merge our mw_upgrade_1.19 git branch into master (which still has 1.17) so that our production code isn't hidden in a branch anymore

I forwarded this to him. I can tell you that he is working on upgrading to 1.20 right now, so this is on the radar. Thank you, Matt