I've thought several times before that CirrusSearch has plenty of advanced syntax, and almost no-one knows about they exist. We added a help link to Special:Search but this help link is per wiki, and I don't think any of the wikis Help:Searching pages even includes the cirrus syntax. On enwiki at least mw:Help:CirrusSearch is linked (at the very very bottom) which might allow a perseverant wikipedian to find them, much more could be done though.
This would be interesting to work on, but I don't expect Discovery will find time to investigate this for Q2. For the current quarter Discovery is focusing its efforts towards fixing the search results you get with a plain query that contains no special syntax. The search results are just not nearly as relevant as they can be. I'm certain I could find time to review anything put together for this though. Off the top of my head I would probably start by adjusting how the autocompleter works, having it know the various prefixes available and include them in the autocomplete drop down. Thats just a random idea from me though, it seems there are plenty of other ideas to go around. If anyone from the community plans to work on this just add me to the related gerrit patch or phabricator ticket and I'll try and help you move it along. On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 7:53 PM, Isarra Yos <zhoris...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 06/10/15 17:12, Daniel Barrett wrote: > >> MZMcBride writes: >> >>> It also seems worthwhile to note that "Special:Search" already has an >>> advanced profile/tab where users can select arbitrary namespaces to >>> search. >>> >> Technically that is true, but I suspect that 95% of the time, 95% of >> users care only about the main namespace. Filter by category, wildcard >> searches, title searches, fuzzy searches, etc., are eminently more usable. >> I'll probably build an advanced search plugin myself if nobody else has >> done it yet. >> >> DanB >> > > This is an important point. Namespace searching by itself really feels > like a much more ham-fisted approach to a lot of this, for when lacking > anything more elegant to narrow things down (not that it's not useful too). > But we do have elegant now, and yet nobody sees it. > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
