>>>> Christian Boltz <opensuse@cboltz.de> 4/15/2012 11:02 AM >>>
>Hello,
>
>Am Donnerstag, 5. April 2012 schrieb Henne Vogelsang:
>> On 04/05/2012 02:05 AM, Rajko M. wrote:
>> > How about changing default to search "Everything" (all namespaces
>> > without few that are in essence tools)
>>
>> Please don't. Especially openSUSE: is one big chaotic info dump again,
>> because nobody gives a shit about the wiki rules. I don't want our
>> distro users to suffer from this just because...
>
>One more reason to make the search better. (No smiley, I'm serious about
>that.)
>IMHO this includes searching all namespaces - and rating the main and
>portal namespace up so that they are always on top of the search
>results.

That is a good idea, but as you mention, not really "doable" with the current extension.

>I had an interesting IRC discussion with yaloki on this some months ago.
>The TL;DR summary is something like "lucene itsself is a very good
>search engine, but the implementation in MediaWiki / the MWSearch
>extension is just broken".

I wouldn't call it "broken", but it has pretty minimal features.  It was, and I think still is, the best searching extension available right now.  It sure beats the heck out of the default search, which is why Wikipedia uses it.

>Pascal was quite shocked when reading the MWSearch code. It more or less
>does the equivalent of "SELECT ... WHERE content LIKE '%searchword%'.
>In other words: lucene has lots of features to get better search results
>and to influence the search result order - but we don't use them.

Hey, it's all open source.  You know what that means :)

 

Seriously though, there really is nothing stopping the wiki team from building a better search extension.  We could either customize it to fit openSUSE, or we can add features in general and submit it upstream.  Heck, we can even build one from scratch if we want to.