Wikipedia: Searching on Wikipedia/Talk

• Is it possible to do a boolean "Turing AND homosexuality" search

Not easily. This works however: "(?s)(Turing.*homosexuality)|(homosexuality.*Turing)". The search will take forever.

• Can this article be split into "basic" and "advanced" searching advice, since bringing up regular expressions so early on might be a culture shock for non-Unix weenies :)

• Though the new search is faster, but the quality of the search result is extremely low compare to the old slow search. For example, I just (Oct 18, 2001) searched "Jim Henson" and there were pages and pages and pages of hit, but none of what I searched for show near the top 30. On the other hand, the slow search produce the results correctly. Have anyone tested or fine tuned this new search engine on wikipedia? It is quite unusable as is.
  • See Wikipedia commentary/Search Engine. The new search indexes the articles periodically, so new pages don't show up for a bit. The old search is simply uncompresses the entire database and greps it, so it will find changes as soon as they happen... if it ever finishes searching. Neither system is perfect, so hopefully there will be improvements. --STG