[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

Fri Mar 14 05:47:46 UTC 2008

Brion Vibber wrote:
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> Brian wrote:
> | No offense, but I feel like we are talking over each other. You made this
> | point in your first e-mail, I addressed it in my next, and you continue
> | making it without addressing my rebuttals. So I'll leave it at that.
>
> I can say the same. Rather than talking at each other here, though, we
> could actually work to improve the situation perhaps?
>
> After some testing, I've reenabled the snippets in results -- that was a
> performance issue two years ago, not one that applies today.
>
> Work is ongoing on the back end, and starting up again on the front end.
> Alternatives and improvements that benefit the public in the open source
> space are certainly welcome -- like the encyclopedia, it's primarily an
> issue of time and interest of people getting involved.
>   
I can only give anecdotal evidence, but my impression is that the search 
really has gotten much better. I used to never bother trying to use it, 
but now I use it first, falling back to Google only if I can't find 
anything via the internal search. The ordering seems mostly reasonable, 
and with the result snippets added, the only Google feature I really 
find I miss now and then is suggesting corrections of misspellings. For 
example I'll sometimes search for some weird transliteration of a 
non-English name on the English Wikipedia that doesn't happen to have a 
redirect created for it yet, and Google will somehow figure out an 
alternate transliteration that differs by a few letters to direct me to, 
which the Wikipedia search doesn't. Just about everything else is 
handled, though, including some reasonable handling of letters with umlauts.

In any case I'd encourage people who haven't used the internal search in 
a while to give it another try.

-Mark