Last modified: 2008-02-04 19:29:25 UTC
I have tried numerous searches for entries which should (and do!) exist in Wikipedia, but, for some bizarre reason, the search mechanism can't find them. For example, I entered "your show of shows" (the classic TV comedy show, starring Sid Caesar, et al.), both with double-quotes and without, yet the mechanism fails to find it! However, when I enter "sid caesar", lo-and-behold, "Your Show of Shows" appears within the found list. This isn't the only example. Try it with "all in the family", "big world little adam" (I found it once, but can't find it, now!), etc.
I'm having the same problem, this totally SUCKS, because my use of the WIKI depends on a reliable search... I'm only hitting searches about 75% of the time. This is unacceptable to me. Is there any effort to fix this? Are there other WIKI's out there that have more reliable search functions?
Regarding the original complaint, most likely the issue was that the reporter looked only for the exact-match "go" results, which wouldn't turn up exact matches under the old case-sensitive search. They should have returned regular search results, however, unless the search server was down or broken at the time (which is possible). Currently we have a case-insensitive exact match, which returns results for all the above examples except the last (which doesn't appear to exist on English Wikipedia at the moment.) As for this second comment, an additional liklihood is the 4-character minimum length in MySQL's default configuration (see the FAQ) and the MySQL stopword list which ignores a lot of short common words and numbers. I'm going to go ahead and INVALID this bug as it's not really targetting anything specific at the moment.
