Thread:Extension talk:Lucene-search/Accentless searching and hiding of redirects in suggestions/reply

Yes, on WMF wikis this is controlled by lucene-search. Basically, what you need to do is to add something like this into your global settings:

[Database] yourwiki: (prefix)

Then you can re-run the build script to build the prefix index as well. Next you need to tell MediaWiki to use lucene as backend for prefix matches. This is done by adding the following into your localsettings.php:

# default host for mwsuggest backend $wgEnableLucenePrefixSearch = true; $wgLucenePrefixHost = '10.0.3.18'; # IP or hostname of your lucene box

For more info on WMF settings: http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/