Last modified: 2012-04-24 01:57:20 UTC
BUG MIGRATED FROM SOURCEFORGE http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=994574&group_id=34373&atid=411192 Originally submitted by Matt Kaufman (kaufman_matt) 2004-07-20 17:23 We have been using MediaWiki 1.3 on MySQL 3.x for about two weeks now and have noticed some strange search behavior with the search button. We have a two pages: "Migrating Old Code" "Migration" When performing a search for "Migrating", the results are: Search results For query "migrating" No page with this exact title exists, trying full text search. Migration 77% (****) Nothing else is returned. It says nothing about the "Migrating Old Code" page. At first I thought there was an issue with MediaWiki not searching page titles, so I tried a few tests and it worked fine. I also tried putting the word "Migrating" in the text of other pages to see if the search results (shown above) would change. They did not... -Matt ------------------------- Additional comments ------------------------ Date: 2004-08-05 08:44 Sender: SF user vibber Is this still going on? Is this a public wiki we can poke at? ------------------------------------------------- Date: 2004-08-06 17:30 Sender: SF user kaufman_matt Sorry, it is not a public wiki. It's still happenig even after upgrading to MySQL 4. ------------------------------------------------- Date: 2004-08-10 21:38 Sender: SF user vibber (Adjusting categorization of bug.)
This only happens when $wgDisableFuzzySearch = false. Here's the problem: We do a fuzzy title search on the word "Migrating". That takes all titles of approximately the same length as "migrating", and returns all titles within a certain Levenshtein distance of the word. Thus the "Migration" article shows up, but since "Migrating Old Code" isn't about the same length as "migrating", it isn't even considered. I think we could either WONTFIX this bug, or modify the fuzzy title search to also use another way of matching titles.
Fuzzy title search is sufficiently problematic that I think we should just disable it by default. It was originally intended to be a middle step between the exact title match ('go') and the much slower fulltext search on the title field; however we had more performance problems with it on Wikipedia and disabled it there. On a more general server it tends to return unexpected results and doesn't make it obvious how to do a normal search after that.
Fuzzy search is being removed in 1.4.
