In the meantime, can anyone think of how to make this
work as a
javascript hack?
Sure, and I can even show you screenshots of me using it. Like the saying goes, "the
future is already here, it's just not widely
distributed yet" :-)
You can check out the experimental screenshots, and an explanation of how it was done,
here:
http://nickj.org/Experiment_with_Suggestion_Searching_on_Wikipedia
As you can see, it definitely has rough edges, but the basic concept works well. The main
obstacles to normal people using it are
the JavaScript cross-domain restrictions (details below), and updating the current
MediaWiki search area to have the option of using
suggestion searching.
I was talking
about integration in *wikipedia*, but if I understand
correctly, you
are talking about doing query on my web site from wikipedia search box ?
If yes, it will probably be a little bit difficult because of browser
protection, you can
not use http request in javascript to another host.
Ok, so that rules out integrating via a user script until the search
database is hosted at wikipedia?
Yes, that is a problem, and to get around it I configured my proxy to silently rewrite
certain requests so that they look like they
come from
en.wikipedia.org, but in reality they come from Julien's site. That allows
me to get around this restriction (and probably
GreaseMonkey would let you do something similar), but it won't be a viable option for
99.9% of people. For them, the suggestions
need to come from the wikipedia (even if it's just a temporary two line script which
bounces the request straight off to Julien's
site).
All the best,
Nick.