Ok, first things first: I’ve lifted the old restriction that disabled search context display for visitors who aren’t logged in. This makes searching much nicer!
The restriction was put in place in November 2005 as a temporary emergency measure to relieve pressure on the database servers. In the intermediate time, our capacity has caught up a lot better and switching it back in caused only a modest bump in visible server load.
Looking forward, I’ve set it up so you can test how the new search plugin will look on Wikipedia once we’ve fully enabled it:
- The current plugin
- The new plugin, currently enabled sitewide on Wikimedia Commons.
The new plugin uses MediaWiki’s core search UI. Right now the only “cool” thing in it is the image thumbnail display, but as we continue to improve it it’s going to become a lot prettier for all MediaWiki users, not just for Wikipedia.
Update: The core search UI has been partially updated, and now more or less matches the style of the LuceneSearch plugin. Still some tweaks to do, and plenty of further improvements to make!