[pmwiki-users] [pmwikiusers] Search rankings/results

[GravyFace]

On 1/12/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:

> By default, search results tend to be ordered by page name.
> This can be changed by using the order= parameter.

I'm not really clear on how to use this "order" parameter.  Is that a
query string parameter?  What are valid order values?

> At the moment there's not a mechanism for weighting pages based
> on term frequency.  It was a topic of discussion sometime last year,
> but thus far I haven't been able to find a good ranking algorithm
> to use (and I don't have any desire to be digging through the source
> code of some other search engine application to find one :-).
>
> At some point I fall back on my "PmWiki is not a search engine"
> philosophy, and say that for advanced, fast full-text searches a
> site will generally be better off setting up a real search engine
> and using it to index PmWiki, rather than us trying to re-invent
> the wheel inside of PmWiki.   (Indeed, an advantage of an external
> search engine is that it would be able to index PDFs and other
> pages on a site that aren't wiki pages.)

I completely agree with you -- the search you've provided in pmWiki
may not be "best of breed" but its completely adequate for most search
needs.

> I'm frequently on the lookout for a good search engine platform
> that could be easily installed alongside PmWiki, but so far I
> haven't been too impressed with the ones I've found.

Which ones have you tried?

> Hope this helps,
>
> Pm
>