Search/Old

Rationale
The Wikimedia search infrastructure hasn't had significant development work for many years. The current system is based on homegrown layer on top of Lucene (lsearchd) that has since been tackled by much larger projects such as Solr. The search system frequently breaks in ways that are difficult to diagnose, and generally makes our Operations staff sad.

Goals for our current effort:
 * Make our existing tools more robust
 * Improve logging in our existing tools to make problems easier to diagnose
 * Migrate away from lsearchd to Solr (or something similar)

Documents

 * Search documentation on Wikitech: Search
 * Ram's setup instructions: wikitech:User:Ram/Search
 * Some notes from Brion in 2008

MWSearch
The MWSearch extension provides a SearchEngine subclass which contacts Wikimedia's Lucene-based search server. This replaces the older LuceneSearch extension which reimplemented the entire Special:Search page.