[Moin-user] MoinMoin search

[Thomas Waldmann]

> When I do a title search, it doesn't find the string, even though the
> string is a heading in the wiki TableOfContents. 

That's a misunderstanding. "title" in that context means the page name
(also visible as part of the URL), not the different headings in the
wiki content.

> When I do a full-text search, it takes forever and I finally just stop
> it. I have a LOT of content on this wiki-probably roughly equivalent
> to 10,000 printed pages. 

Then you should rather use Xapian based indexed search (much faster for
big wikis, can also search attachments and history).

See the help page about it.

But be warned: indexed search will only find stuff that was put into the
index.

For example, if your page has the content "This is completely FooBar.",
then Xapian will happily find:
 * this
 * is
 * complete
 * completely
 * foo
 * Bar
 * foobar

But it will likely NOT find:
 * his
 * omple
 * oo
 * oba

This is because the tokenizer that splits the content into pieces before putting those pieces into the index
does the splitting at different kind of boundaries, usually blanks, punctuation and CamelCase word boundaries.

A good ideas when you setup xapian search is to delete / rebuild the index at some time when nobody uses the wiki.
Moin also does dynamic updates of the index, but don't rely on that over long periods of time.

You are also strongly advised to use a recent moin version (1.8.0, or 1.7.2 if you don't use gui editor).