Can search accuracy be improved?

Question

I like this site, a lot of good work has gone into it and I'd like to use it more. One thing that's causing me not to do so is navigating to the page I actually want to get to.

Say for example I want information on the table HTML element, so I do a search for "table": http://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?search=table&fulltext=+&title=Special%3ASearch

The first 8 of 14 title results on that page are duplications, and the page html/elements/table doesn't appear in the title results list at all.

Is there any way this can be improved, perhaps by swapping or tuning the MediaWiki search plugin?

Thanks for all the effort being put in.

Answer 1

Use google site search.

 

It will almost certainly be better than whatever implementation of search they have tried.

It tried the same search and got numerous unique and useful results from googling "site:docs.webplatform.org table"

Comments

Google site search is sometimes better. For another example, try searching for "form", and google site search for "site:docs.webplatform.org form". Obviously in time you'd expect the google result for to float to the top as people click it, but at the moment it's not even on the first 3 pages of results for either search.

Answer 2

We should likely use Lucene and add the MediaWiki extension for this. Right now we're using MediaWiki's default search, which isn't good.

Answer 3

There are many MediaWiki extensions to improve searching, I'm sure something will be added to help fix it. You can check out search extensions here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Search_extensions

There are also some pretty basic settings you can add such as MW Suggest that will make searching a little more bearable for MediaWiki:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings#Search

Just some stuff you can check out if you want to make suggestions for fixing the search.