Forum:Searches do not find proper page anymore

Please go to the Christian Music Wiki. The names of our song pages are named along the lines "Artist/Album/Song". However, if you search for just the song name, you get unpredictable results. With the old search system, the correct song was almost always the first choice. Now I never see it.

As an example, I would expect the search string "There to Here" to turn up as the number one result w:c:ChristianMusic:East to West/North of the Sky/There to Here. However, if that song is listed, it is buried.

I do normally put redirect pages in for each song, but I still think the search could be better. (For now, the There to Here redirect was omitted so the test suggested above would be a search rather than a redirect.) Will (talk -- contribs) 04:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I think the problem may be, that with subpages by default not enabled in that namespace, you aren't looking for a full page name, but just a part of it: "Artist/Album/Song" is quite different than "Song". Enabling subpages in a namespace treats "Song" as the page title (or at least, more of one than without). Try a test: Create the same subpage in two namespaces, one in main and one in User:, eg w:c:christianmusic:User:Will Pittenger/Some song title and w:c:christianmusic:Test/Some song title, and see if that makes any type of search engine difference. If it does, you might request the devs enable subpages in your main namespace. --Splarka (talk) 03:20, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

So what changed other than the symptoms? It used to work just fine. Will (talk -- contribs) 21:27, 25 September 2006 (UTC)


 * BTW: Neither page showed up when I searched for "Some Song Title". I had the text in the page and in the page name. Will (talk -- contribs) 21:30, 25 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, another possibility is the search index hasn't been rebuilt lately. --Splarka (talk) 22:13, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

This appears fixed. Will (talk -- contribs) 06:08, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * After further examination, some problems still persist with searches. First, there are some song names that when I force it to search rather than simply going to the page, it fails.  Take w:c:ChristianMusic:Kathy Triccoli/Kathy Triccoli/All of My Life.  w:c:ChristianMusic:All of My Life redirects there.  However, as a search string "All of My Life" finds nothing relevant.  The title results that do turn up all just happen to have "Life" in the title.


 * I found other strings that found nothing at all in the same circumstances find nothing at all for title matches. One even turned up a title match page that had no words in common with the search string.  What did they share?  Even though it was supposedly a title match, it listed matching text.  That included the letter 'i' because the song title included the word "I".  Granted, that letter as a search term is poor.  But I was looking for page title matches which should have taken priority.


 * To me, it only makes sense if search title match results are sorted based on how much if the string matched. Suppose in the ChristianMusic wiki the search was "All of My Life".  The first result should be w:c:ChristianMusic:All of My Life because that page name matches the search string exactly.  The second result should be w:c:ChristianMusic:Kathy Triccoli/Kathy Triccoli/All of My Life because the entire search string is a substring of the page title.  Then you get pages that have only partital substrings like "Life" in them.


 * Now having said all that, I have to note that from time to time, it works just fine. There is no rhyme or reason for this. Will (talk -- contribs) 19:48, 8 October 2006 (UTC)