Forum:Default Search Functionality

As far as user friendliness goes, I've found the wikia search engine and interface to be a bit lacking. Coming from a relatively new user who has been doing lots of research and testing while starting up the UC Berkeley Wiki, there is nothing more frustrating than searching for something you know is there only to have no results come back.

First of all, having categories like Help and Advice and even categories themselves not come up by default is silly. Yes, you can have some of these boxes checked by default in your preferences, but that's a lot to expect from new users. If there is a way to specify by default, please let me know.

Also, 3 letter words and plurals could definitely be handled better. I suppose these could be handled with redirects, but that's a pretty big hassle.

I just noticed that WowWiki has a new and improved search engine that addresses some of my concerns, any plans to implement it for other wikia?

-Matthew 01:00, 16 August 2008 (UTC)