Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

I recently came across a wiki which implements a more useful way to access
(search) pages by actually implementing a form of fuzzy (approximate) bookmarking.

I am copying the relevant text from http://wiki.tcl.tk/391 :

To search for the word "cgi" in all page titles, you can use the URL:
  
        http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/cgi

To search for this word in all titles and in the full texts, use:

        http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/cgi*  (in general: an regular expression)

Or, if you prefer, you can enter the search word on the search page, at:

        http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/search

But there's a little more to it. That last URL is actually a form of fuzzy
bookmarking. There is no web page called "search". Wikit presents its contents
as if it were a directory with pages, but its all smoke and mirrors...

First of all, note that all Wikit pages have a unique identifying number. The
"About" page is at http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/1.html, for example. But although
these unique IDs are effective for internal links, they are quite awkward as
bookmarks, since they convey no information whatsoever about the title or
contents of a page.

To offer a more useful way of bookmarking, pages which are not of the form
<number>.html are treated as search instructions to locate a page. The following
URL is an instruction to look for a page titled "hawaii":

        http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/hawaii

Assuming there is a page titled "hawaii" (case is ignored), the above URL will
lead directly to that page.

But wiki's change. So do page titles, occasionally. Some page titles are long
and may contain embedded spaces or other inconvenient characters. This all makes
the above search mechanism a bit too brittle for long-lasting URLs.

To solution which has been adopted here, is to refine the search process as
follows (everything after the slash will be called the search term):

   1. If the search term is a reference to a page (<number>.html), then simply
go to that page
   2. If the search term matches a page title (while ignoring case), then jump
to the page with that title
   3. If the search term includes one or more upper-case letters, modify the
search to be approximate (see below). If the approximate match finds exactly one
page, jump to that page.
   4. Otherwise, treat the search term as a regular search, and present the
search results.

Approximate matching - if the search term has upper-case letters, for example
"OneTwoThree", it is turned into a match pattern (using the glob / string match
syntax). In the example given, a search would be performed on page titles
matching the pattern "*[Oo]ne*[Tt]wo*[Tt]hree*".

What's the point of all this? Well... this mechanism allows you to specify URLs
pointing into the Tcl'ers Wiki with some quite attractive properties:

    * If the search keyword is accurate enough, it's equivalent to a real URL
    * If the search is general enough, it'll survive minor title changes (e.g.
typo's)
    * The URL has a meaningful word in it, so people can remember what it was about
    * If more pages are added to the wiki, the search will turn up more than one
match
    * This is an extremely useful feature, because the original match will be
one of the search results listed, and so will new - probably related - pages

For an example, here's a link to Don Libes' book on Expect:

        http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/Expect

And here's a search which lists all pages where the word "expect" is used:

        http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/expect*