Search/Old

MediaWiki's full-text search is split between back-end and front-end classes, allowing for the backend to be extended with plugins.

Work for MediaWiki 1.13
Some work is going on now (March 2008) to improve the front-end for MediaWiki 1.13.


 * Thumbnails
 * done Hits that return 'Image:' pages now include a thumbnail and basic image metadata instead of raw text extracts.
 * Thumbnails for media gallery pages and categories might be great!
 * Text extracts
 * These need to be prettified... a lot :)
 * Categories and other metadata?
 * Be nice to add some stuff while keeping it clean
 * Search refinement field
 * Recommend moving this up to the top, like the limited one LuceneSearch extension had.
 * The namespace checklist is currently awful, should be cleaned up in some nice way.

Back end
MediaWiki currently ships with two functional search backends; one for MySQL 4.x and later, and the other for PostgreSQL. Custom classes can also be loaded, and $wgSearchType set to the desired class name.

SearchEngine
This is an abstract base class, with stubs for full-text searches in the title and text fields, and a standard implementation for doing exact-title matches.

SearchMySQL4
The SearchMySQL and SearchMySQL4 classes implement boolean full-text searches using MySQL's fulltext indexing for MyISAM tables. (In old versions of MediaWiki there was a SearchMySQL3 class as well, which did some extra work to do boolean queries.)

SearchPostgres
I'm not actually sure how SearchPostgres and SearchTsearch2 classes relate. Is one of them obsolete, or... ?

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.