Improve search in Mediawiki and SMW (October 1, 2020)
Improve search in Mediawiki and SMW (October 1, 2020)
Mediawiki provides a built-in fulltext search. But especially when you are using it together with SemanticMediaWiki (SMW) you have usually a lot more structured data available which can be used to improve the search in the wiki. Power-Search make use of this additional structured data and provides a faceted search interface which combines fulltext search with drill-down data search.
You can enter a search term and then drill-down by a category facet - or the other way round of course. It's search as you type, the results change immediately. You can search for all pages written by a particular author about a particular topic as long as this is modeled in the structured data. It's important to understand that this does not require manual configuration. The facets are available and adapt automatically as soon as the data is available. ---
Frustrating search experience without meaningful refiners:
Entering the search term "dienstleistung" returns a lot of irrelevant documents where the term appears but which is not actually a "dienstleistung (service)" .
Better: filter documents by category, author, topic, etc:
If you provide search refiners, then the users will be able to precicely filter for all "dienstleistung" documents, for instance.
The following steps assume that you have a running Mediawiki (>= 1.31) instance with SemanticMediawiki extension (>= 3.0) installed. If you require assistance then we are happy to help!
What's next?
Customize the search
- You dont need property facets in your search? You can switch them off.
- You want to boost some articles and make sure others are ranked less? You can configure that also.
- You need a special feature which is not available? Talk to us. Power-Search is extensible.
Questions?