Extension:RigorousSearch

The RigorousSearch extension implements a full-page search facility, by the tedious method of individually searching the source of each page as stored in the "page" / "text" tables -- not the FULLTEXT index kept in the "searchindex" table for MySQL searches.

This is very slow, and almost totally useless -- except that it allows searching of the complete page source, not just the user-visible version of the text stored in "searchindex". So, for example, if you want to search for hyperlinks to a particular web site, this will work, whereas a MediaWiki search would not ("searchindex" includes link text, but not the link URL). You can also use it to search for particular markup tags.

A useful application is to search for novice users making " " links into the wiki instead of using regular wikilinks, which causes pages to appear orphaned when they're not.


 * Note: Extension:LinkSearch can also search for particular  links, and is much faster (but it wasn't around when RigorousSearch was originally written). Extension:LinkSearch was also made obsolete by Special:LinkSearch, added to core in MW 1.14.0.

Usage
The extension creates a new special page,. Because it uses a lot of resources, access is restricted to users with "patrol" user rights (which by default means sysops). (You can change this easily enough; search for "patrol" in the code.)

You can invoke this feature in multiple ways:


 * Go to, and fill in the search form.
 * Link to  to do an immediate search for "mypattern".  Due to URL processing, this won't work for patterns containing special characters, including multiple slashes (as in " ").
 * Link to .   This also does an immediate search for "mypattern", but you can use "%2F" escapes for slashes, etc.

Note that this is really slow. You should only use it when necessary, and you probably shouldn't use it on large wikis at all.

Installation

 * 1) Download the extension code:
 * 2) * Version 1.0: known to work with PHP 5 and MW 1.7; may work on PHP 4.
 * 3) Save the code in your wiki's   directory as.