Search/Old/CirrusSearchFeatures

So this information can be turned into a help page one day:

First and foremost CirrusSearch is a workalike for the current search system, MWSearch. Everything here should work unless it is explicitly mentioned as being different in this document.

This is distilled from CirrusSearch's browser tests at http://git.wikimedia.org/tree/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FCirrusSearch.git/master/tests%2Fbrowser%2Ffeatures.

Updates
Updates to the search index are done in near real time. You should be able to search for your changes as soon as you make them. Changes to templates should take effect in articles that include the template in a few minutes. The templates changes use the job queue so performance may vary. A null edit to the article will force the change through but that shouldn't be required if everything is going well.

Search suggestions
The search suggestions you get when you type into the search box that drops down candidate pages is substantively the same with articles sorted by the number of incoming links. Worth noting is that if you start your search with ~ we won't find any articles as you type and you can safely hit enter at any time to jump to the search results page.

ASCII/accents/diacritics folding is turned on for English text, but there are some formatting problems with the result. See 52656.

Full text search
Full text search (the kind that lands you on the search results page) searching in title, redirects, headings, and article text so it shouldn't present any surprises. The big change here is that templates are expanded.

There are some relevant open bugs:
 * Strict phrase matches (those that turn of stemming) aren't always properly highlighted

Changes to filters (intitle:, and incategory:)
We've tightened up the syntax around these quite a bit.
 * intitle:foo
 * Find articles whose title contains foo. Stemming is enabled for foo.
 * intitle:"foo bar"
 * Find articles whose title contains foo and bar. Stemming is enabled for foo and bar.
 * intitle:foo bar
 * Find articles whose title contains foo and whose title or text contains bar.
 * intitle: foo bar
 * Syntax error, devolves into searching for articles whose title or text contains intitle:, foo, and bar.
 * incategory:Music
 * Find articles that are in Category:Music
 * incategory:"music history"
 * Find articles that are in Category:Music_history
 * incategory:"musicals" incategory:"1920"
 * Find articles that are in both Category:Musicals and Category:1920
 * cow*
 * Find articles whose title or text contains words that start with cow

prefix:
The prefix: syntax in its current form is relied upon for a bunch of functionality so it's been recreated as exactly as possible.
 * prefix:cow
 * Find articles whose title starts with cow in the content namespaces
 * domestic prefix:cow
 * Find articles whose title starts with cow and that contain domestic and are in the content namespaces
 * domestic prefix:cow/
 * Find all subarticles of all cow articles in content namespaces that contain the word domestic. This is a very common search and is frequently build using a special url parameter called 'prefix'.
 * domestic prefix:Talk:cow/
 * Find all subarticles of the talk page for cow containing domestic
 * cow prefix:Pink Floyd/
 * Find all subarticles of all Pink Floyd articles in the content namespaces which contain cow. The space is is significant.

Note that the old rule of having to put prefix: at the end of the query still applies.

Special Prefixes

 * morelike:Endothermic
 * Find articles whose text is similar to Endothermic.
 * Talk:Foo
 * Find articles in the talk namespace whose title or text contains the word foo

Did you mean
Did you mean suggestions are designed to notice if you misspell an uncommon phrase that happens to be an article title. If so, they'll let you know. They also seem to suggest more things then they ought to sometimes.

Prefer phrase matches
If you don't have too much special syntax in your query we'll give perfect phrase matches a boost. I'm being intentionally vague because I'm not sure exactly what "too much special syntax" should be. Right now if you add any explicit phrases to your search we'll turn off this feature.

Fuzzy search
Putting a ~ after a search term activates fuzzy search. You can also put a number from 0 to 1 to control the "fuzziness," e.g. nigtmare~.9 or lighnin~.1. Closer to one is less fuzzy.

Phrase search and proximity
Surrounding some words in quotes declares that you are searching for those words close together. You can add a ~ and then a number after the second quote to control just how close you mean. The proper name for this "closeness" is "phrase slop". The default "phrase slop" is 1.

Quotes and exact matches
Quotes turn on exact term matches. You can add a ~ to the quote to go back to the more aggressive matcher you know and love.

prefer-recent:
You can give recently edited articles a boost in the search results by adding "prefer-recent:" to the beginning of your search. By default this will scale 60% of the score exponentially with the time since the last edit with a half life of 160 days. This can be modified like this: "prefer-recent:,". proportion_of_score_to_scale must be a number between 0 and 1 inclusive. half_life_in_days must be greater than 0 but allows decimal points. This number works pretty well if very small. I've tested it around .0001 which is 8.64 seconds.

This will eventually be on by default for wikinews but there is no reason why you can't activate it in any of your searches.