Manual:Rebuildtextindex.php

rebuildtextindex.php is a maintenance script used to [re]create text index that allows users to use search facility in your wiki. You should run it if you see that search gives no or few results.

Invocation
php maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php

Example
vi-notebook:/var/lib/mediawiki1.7# php maintenance/rebuildtextindex.php Dropping index... Rebuilding index fields for 1426 pages... 1000 Rebuild the index... Done.