Another in today’s series of fun feature enablings…
The search boxes on Wikimedia wikis now have an AJAX-powered search suggestion drop-down. This calls our JSON OpenSearch suggestion interface, which has been used for some time by Firefox’s search box and Mac OS X 10.5’s Dictionary application, but is now built-in for your viewing pleasure.
(In MediaWiki 1.13 development trunk, turn on $wgEnableMWSuggest to experience this yourself!)
A similar AJAX-powered search feature has been in MediaWiki for some time, but the user interface for it took over the whole article area, which was a bit distracting, and we never used it ourselves.
Robert Stojnic, the tireless coder who’s put a huge amount of effort into fixing up our Lucene-based search engine over the last months, patched up the front-end to fit more naturally into the existing forms.
The built-in search for suggestions is currently a simple prefix match, so it’ll help you complete words and names, but isn’t smart enough to fill out from a last name or skip “the” etc. Robert’s got a new backend in the works, which will add all those smarts when we’re ready to upgrade the search systems with the new software and a bit beefier hardware.
Prefix matches are a heck of a lot better than nothing, though, and as long as it’s not causing undue server load we’ll keep it on until the new backend’s ready.
(If you don’t like the suggestions widget, you can disable them by checking “Disable AJAX suggestions” in the “Search” tab at Special:Preferences.)