Manual:Rebuildtextindex.php

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

This may take several hours, depending on the database size and server configuration.

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.