Search/Old/CirrusSearchFeatures

So this information can be turned into a help page one day:

First and foremost CirrusSearch is a workalike for the current search system, MWSearch. Everything here should work unless it is explicitly mentioned as being different in this document.

This is distilled from CirrusSearch's browser tests at http://git.wikimedia.org/tree/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FCirrusSearch.git/master/tests%2Fbrowser%2Ffeatures.

Updates
Updates to the search index are done in near real time. You should be able to search for your changes as soon as you make them. Changes to templates should take effect in articles that include the template in a few minutes. The templates changes use the job queue so performance may vary. A null edit to the article will force the change through but that shouldn't be require if everything is going well.

Search suggestions
The search suggestions you get when you type into the search box that drops down candidate pages is substantively the same with articles sorted by the number of incoming links. Worth noting is that if you start your search with ~ we won't find any articles as you type and you can safely hit enter at any time to jump to the search results page.

Ascii folding is turned on for English text but there are some formatting problems with the result. See 52656.

Full text search
Full text search (the kind that lands you on the search results page) searching in title, redirects, headings, and article text so it shouldn't present any surprises. The big change here is that templates are expanded.

There are some relevant open bugs:
 * Quotes don't turn off stemming
 * Some degenerate queries cause error messages
 * prefix: and term* don't prefer matches in article titles over text

Changes to prefix filters (intitle:, incategory:, and prefix:)
We've tightened up the syntax around these quite a bit.
 * intitle:foo
 * Find articles who's title contains foo. Stemming is enabled for foo.
 * intitle:"foo bar"
 * Find articles who's title contains foo and bar. Stemming is enabled for foo and bar.
 * intitle:foo bar
 * Find articles who's title contains foo and who's title or text contains bar.
 * intitle: foo bar
 * Syntax error, devolves into searching for articles who's title or text contains intitle:, foo, and bar.
 * incategory:Music
 * Find articles that are in Category:Music
 * incategory:"music history"
 * Find articles that are in Category:Music_history
 * incategory:"musicals" incategory:"1920"
 * Find articles that are in both Category:Musicals and Category:1920
 * prefix:cow
 * Find articles who's title or text contains words that start with cow
 * cow*
 * Same as prefix:cow

Special Prefixes

 * morelike:Endothermic
 * Find articles who's text is similar to Endothermic.
 * Talk:Foo
 * Find articles in the talk namespace who's title or text contains the word foo

Did you mean
Did you mean suggestions are designed to notice if you misspell an uncommon phrase that happens to be an article title. If so, they'll let you know. They also seem to suggest more things then they ought to sometimes.

Prefer phrase matches
If you don't have too much special syntax in your query we'll give perfect phrase matches a boost. I'm being intentionally vague because I'm not sure exactly what "too much special syntax" should be. Right now if you add any explicit phrases to your search we'll turn off this feature.

Fuzzy search
Putting a ~ after a search term activates fuzzy search. You can also put a number from 0 to 1 to control the "fuzziness," e.g. nigtmare~.9 or lighnin~.1. Closer to one is less fuzzy.

Phrase search and proximity
Surrounding some words in quotes declares that you are searching for those words close together. You can add a ~ and then a number after the last quote to control just how close you mean, e.g. "flowers algernon"~1 will find Flowers for Algernon but "flowers algernon"~0 won't. "algernon novel"~10 will find "Flowers for Algernon is a science fiction short story and subsequent novel by...". The default proximity if you don't add ~ after the quotes is ~1.