Wikipedia:Searching bug reports

'''This is an archive only of bug reports from Phase II of the Wikipedia software (used before June 20, 2002). Please see Bug reports for instructions on adding bug reports for the current system.'''

A search for 'barry took' does not find the Barry Took article The Anome, Monday, April 1, 2002

This may be stop-words stopping 'took', but I would expect the search routine to at least check, for a search of the form 'x y z', whether there was an article with the exact title 'x y z' (up to case, and possibly accents) in the Wikipedia, regardless of any stop words. Otherwise naive users will miss articles that actually exist. I think I've seen more examples of this, but this is one I can demonstrate. This needs to be fixed, not documented.

A search for 'FORTH' or 'forth' returns nothing, though there is a article named 'FORTH'. Rather weird.


 * Yup, both of these are stopword issues. AxelBoldt


 * I dont get it. I guess the search engine doesn't search for all substrings in forth, so why block that search? sandos


 * I guess that the search for "third reich" is one in the same category? (There's an article title thus, and it's mentioned in others as well) jheijmans, 28 May 2002.

Funny chars in links screw up article rendering The Anome, Monday, April 1, 2002

A link containing the four characters "!Xu~" did funny things to the rendering of the old version of the Phonetics article that contained it.
 * Same bug as below. Fix your links, and the bug won't catch ya. (Fixed in CVS.) Brion VIBBER, Monday, April 1, 2002

Simple searches failing with apostrophes (2002/02/04)

A search for 'benfords law' failed to find the benford's law article. (I put in a redirect to fix this, but this is such a common case that this is arguably a bug.)

Related: account creation fails when password contains a n apostrophe (2002/02/27)

Searches also fail with hyphens (2002/02/12)

Probably related to the apostrophe above; a search on 'Kraft-Ebbing', 'Bulwer-Lytton' or 'Sacher-Masoch' comes up blank, in spite of there being articles on all these people; a search for 'Lytton' though, does come up with the correct page, so the problem appears to be the non-aphanumeric character. Malcolm Farmer

Searches now reject hyphens (2002/03/05)

I re-ran the search for a term with a hyphen: I tried looking for "Bain-marie" and instead of coming up blank as previously, the search now returns:

Sorry, your boolean search query contains the following errors: "bain" [!! SYNTAX ERROR: illegal symbol '-'; ignored]

AND "marie"

Malcolm Farmer


 * This is not a bug, it's a feature: before, the search failed silently, now it tells you why it fails. See Searching. AxelBoldt


 * The fact that it fails instead of doing the right thing is a bug. Judeo-Christian should be transformed into "Judeo Christian" (or Judeo Christian if you don't support phrase search). --Damian Yerrick

2002/07/14 .... This bloody thing turned up zilch when I searched for "golden mean".

When i was searching for 'grammar' i got this ugly error, so you might want to check it out.

A database query syntax error has occurred. The last attempted database query was: "SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('grammar')) ) AND cur_namespace IN LIMIT 0, 20" from within function "SearchEngine::showResults". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ') LIMIT 0, 20' at line 1".

MurtZ