Matt, 2010/7/17 Matthew Ehle :

Hello,

This was discussed late last year.  However, the hardware and software upgrades that were going on at the time took precedence, so the discussion went on the back burner.  In addition, the wiki upgrade last December provided much better search functionality, so that also took away a lot of motivation in that area.

However, it may be worth it to revive that discussion.  I experimented a little with both Lucene and Sphinx back in November, and I would be willing to take another look.  Setting this up will require enough work that a bug/enhancement request will have to be opened and Novell will need to put a priority on it.  That being said, I agree that the default search leaves something to be desired and I would like to see it discussed some more.

Thanks for the brief insight into this. Question from my perspective is: Who exactly is doing this MediaWiki search investigation? Who take a decision if it's actually needed or not (btw, from my perspective it is) and who finally drives the Novell internal requesting processes to get it done. From my experience we won't get too far without a respective assignee for that particular task. That said, would you (your specific knowledge considered) be willing to allocate the needed resources and put it on your very own agenda to get it done? Assumed you're fine with it: What about taking Google custom search into account to achieve better search results? Best, R

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C 7/16/2010 10:17 AM >>> I have seen a lot of mails flying by about the Wiki rework etc, but.. (I may have missed the discussion) has there been any plans or thought

-Matt put into fixing the poor default search in MediaWiki?

There was a discussion about this on the Project list a few days ago, and it brought up a very good point.  The default search within MediaWiki is very poor to say the least.  There are a couple of extensions for MediaWiki available that vastly improve the returned results, especially this one: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MWSearch combined with http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lucene-search

Are there any plans to implement this extension, or do anything to improve the search results?

C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org

-- Rupert Horstkötter open-slx Community Manager openSUSE Board Member http://open-slx.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org

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"Matthew Ehle" 7/26/2010 12:44 PM >>> Rupert,

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Thanks for the brief insight into this. Question from my perspective is: Who exactly is doing this MediaWiki search investigation? Who take a decision if it's actually needed or not (btw, from my perspective it is) and who finally drives the Novell internal requesting processes to get it done. From my experience we won't get too far without a respective assignee for that particular task.

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That said, would you (your specific knowledge considered) be willing to allocate the needed resources and put it on your very own agenda to get it done? Assumed you're fine with it: What about taking Google custom search into account to achieve better search results?

I would love to take this on. I think the number of emails and requests is more than sufficient to say >that this is needed, and I can also personally vouch that the current search is inadequate.

The only thing that I cannot do is be the internal driver for the requesting process, since I am no >longer a Novell employee. I will talk to some people and make the argument for a new search, but >the approval and prioritization is pretty much out of my hands. It might be good to get whoever is >filling in for Zonker to help out on that part.

As for the Google search, that could do the trick. If nothing else, I can check it out and deploy it as a >temporary measure while we look at the other options. If it works well enough, it would be quick and >would avoid all the mess of getting a lot of work time approved.

I have created a bug on this, which can be found at https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=625677

I talked to a contact at Novell, and I am free to work on it now. I have started another thread with some of the things I'm trying. Thanks!

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Rupert Horstkötter 7/28/2010 10:58 AM >>> Matt,

2010/7/26 Matthew Ehle :

I have created a bug on this, which can be found at https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=625677

I see. Thanks for starting this. That said, I unfortunately get an "access denied" when trying to see this particular bug report :-( May some Booster please push this forward? Thanks in advance, R -- Rupert Horstkötter open-slx Community Manager openSUSE Board Member http://open-slx.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org

Matt, 2010/7/26 Matthew Ehle :

I would love to take this on.  I think the number of emails and requests is more than sufficient to say that this is needed, and I can also personally vouch that the current search is inadequate.

+1, great to see you willing to drive it.

The only thing that I cannot do is be the internal driver for the requesting process, since I am no longer a Novell employee.  I will talk to some people and make the argument for a new search, but the approval and prioritization is pretty much out of my hands.  It might be good to get whoever is filling in for Zonker to help out on that part.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Actually you're writing with an @novell.com address which is an indicator to me that you'd be a Novell employee :-) What about asking the Boosters (Henne, Tom, Klaas, Pavol, etc) to drive the requesting process then? That seems the most easy way to achieve it to me.

As for the Google search, that could do the trick.  If nothing else, I can check it out and deploy it as a temporary measure while we look at the other options.  If it works well enough, it would be quick and would avoid all the mess of getting a lot of work time approved.

+1. Haven't thought about the approval process with a Google search here. Still, I think it'd be the best solution from a usability perspective (i.e. best search results). Best, R

-Matt

-- Rupert Horstkötter open-slx Community Manager openSUSE Board Member http://open-slx.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-wiki+help@opensuse.org