All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXI

[GethN7]

With luck this will also minimize the redundant results.  I'm so tired of doing a search and seeing the same pages show up multiple times.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Searching


Here's how default search works (copied from above link, it's CC0 Public domain licensed), and in bold is my notes on what Advanced Search does:

• It searches all pages on the wiki with some restrictions.
  

Advanced Search enhances this to allow searching any namespace. Default search was limited to content pages, multimedia pages, or everything. There was a limited advanced searching feature with the default search, but it's less precise with exact text searches.

• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click "edit", not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
  

Mostly unchanged behavior, but this time we can be more precise in nailing down where the text appears for specific text strings

• The search functionality can be considered to operate on whole words, separated by spaces or other punctuation marks. So if your search term includes the word 'book', the results will not include pages that only have the word 'books' or 'booklet'. And if your search term includes the term 'inter', the results will not include pages that only have the word 'international', but they may include pages that have the term 'inter-national'.
  

Advanced search lets us be more precise by excluding certain terms.

• The results will only include pages that contain all the words in your search.
  

Advanced Search allows exclusion of some words and specific combinations of words to be included and excluded.

• You can search for parts of words using a wildcard (
  
  
  
  Code:

  *
  ), so 
  
  
  
  Code:

  book*
   will return results for 
  
  
  
  Code:

  book
   and 
  
  
  
  Code:

  books
  . This operation is more expensive.
  

We have slightly finer-grained searching now, we can exclude "book" and just pick up "books".

• You can search for a phrase using double quotes. A phrase can be considered to consist of whole words, so the phrase 'Prime Minister' will not be found by a search for "ime Min", but it will be found by a search for "Prime Minister".
  

Mostly unchanged.


FINAL NOTES:

Without CirrusSearch, some options like the "Structure" Search features and any other page sorting feature will not work aside from the "Relevance" option. If we ever can get CirrusSearch enabled, we can do even finer-grained searching by categories and subcategories (up to a limit of 255 pages and 5 categories) and make use of the other Structure-based search options.

By default, we should be getting all search results in the order of most relevant search results with the optional better exclusion of terms to whittle down some of the clutter if nothing else.