MediaWiki Tip: Enhancing your search results with tags

MediaWiki has many limitations with regards to its search engine.Sometimes searching for 3 to 5 letter words does not return any result.It is also known that the Wiki engine is limited in terms of syntax and functionality.

The use of search extensions such as Lucene (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lucene-search) will help overcome the setbacks of MediaWiki's search facility.

Personally I haven't tested any of those extensions. Running a relatively small corporate wiki hasn't given need for advanced search requirements  - at least not yet!

One thing I would like to share though is how to tag your pages with keywords you don't necessarily want to show as content on the pages.

Lets say you want a page called 'Test', which contains steps to install a printer, to show up each time a user searches for words like HP, Xerox or Lexmark. You don't want these words to appear on the page itself coz you've got nothing to say about them. I simply use the basic HTML comment tag!

Yeps, as any MediaWiki user will know, there is a list of permitted HTML tags which can be integrated in the Wiki Markup code.

Thus, searching for Lexmark will return the results hereunder:

 

As easy as that. Hope this helped.