Topic on Help talk:CirrusSearch

Hello. I was thinking of a possibility of combining funcionalities of PetScan and CirrusSearch. Like first run a query on Petscan, get a list of pages and then run a query on these pages with CirrusSearch. That obviously means that I need to store that first list somewhere. As you cannot put a thousand of pages in intitle: ;) and you cannot introduce an array of titles to run query on in any other way then the only sensible choice would be to save the list as links somewhere in a sandbox, and then use it later. Unfortunetaly such funcionality doesn't exist as well. That's why I would like to ask if it would be possible to introduce anything like this? We have "linksto:" then why not "linksfrom:"? It shouldn't be too hard. I'm not too well-versed in MediaWiki database architecture, so excuse me if I'm just talking nonsense, but aren't links on a page stored somewhere in one table?

Not sure it would be possible, at least not easily, from the search engine . From this perspective the problem is that `linksto` is a property of the page content, it comes out of the mediawiki parser as a property of the rendered wikitext. `linksfrom` is the opposite, This would have to be propagated on each edit to the set of linked pages.

There are links tables in SQL that can do joins to resolve the set of pages linking to a page, but within the Search engine there is nothing conceptually similar, the underlying technology doesn't have the ability to join multiple datasources at query time.

It's far from impossible, but the conceptual model around updates is reversed from the current model making both updating the data and ensuring its correctness difficult.

Thanks for your answer. I thought it would not be so difficult since we have a special page Special:RecentChangesLinked which shows changes in pages that not only link to a given page but also those that link from it; it seems to me that there should a way. But since you say it'd be difficult then I'm not going to push for it (though such feature would be of use). Sorry for my bad English.