[pmwiki-users] Search box on PmWiki.org

Oliver Betz list_ob at gmx.net
Thu Jan 25 04:10:51 CST 2007


Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

[...]

> I've now re-done the search results on pmwiki.org a bit.  
> Any matching pages in the PmWiki, Cookbook, PITS, and Site groups
> are displayed first (in that order), followed by pages in other 
> groups on the wiki (in alphabetical order).

that's a significant improvement.

> Each matching page has any $:Summary value displayed after it.

That's an interesting option I've not yet seen in other Wikis. Still 
waiting for some excerpt from the page text, though (SCNR).

[pages with matching titles first]

> We might be able to do this.  It sounds a bit like a specialized
> pagelist, though, since some pages would end up being listed twice.

Dokuwiki shows you a popup of matching pagenames if you type 
something in the search field. And it shows first a list of matching 
pagenames, then a list of pagetext matches - IMO a good solution. I 
recommend to try it at http://wiki.splitbrain.org/

PhpWiki has a search for pagenames ("TitleSearch") and a search for 
page text ("FullTextSearch") - even "fuzzy" (similar sounding, only 
for english). If you give enough text in a "TitleSearch" to yield 
only one result, you are taken to that page immediately - else you 
get a list of pages. That's very convenient if you want to go to a 
certain page but don't remember the whole name or don't want to type 
it in completely.

PhpWiki also supports PCRE expressions in searches, but I'm afraid 
most users don't know how to use them. The options in PmWiki seem to 
be sufficient to me.

> Another possibility would be to put a ranking algorithm on the search 
> results, and display the pages in order of best match (like most 

I guess this would give the most useful result.

Oliver
-- 
Oliver Betz, Muenchen





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