Tales from the Tardis/Search beta-test

Today, we began participating in another beta-test programme. This one centres on the search element. Those who've been around Wikia a while know that searching has always been a bit ... weird. So, until the end of the month, we'll be brandishing Wikia's newest search engine.

For articles in the main namespace, it really is extraordinarily faster. You'll notice it produces results from the very first letter entered. In the traditional search engine, it only worked after you entered three letters. That was extraordinarily frustrating on some wikis: imagine being at w:c:jamesbond and trying to find articles on M or Q!

Also, this new way of searching gives you images, where available. This will be extraordinarily helpful to us, now that Moffat has thrown the cat amongst the pigeons with Doctor numbering. Now, people will type in "El" and know exactly who we mean by "Eleventh Doctor".

Also, redirects are listed alongside proper article names. This will help us out with, for example, Hartnell episode names. Let's say you're having a conversation with a person who knows her Hartnell well, and she casually mentions, I dunno, "The Destruction of Time". You nod your head, cause you don't want to look like an idiot. But casually, you bring your iPhone up and start typing in "The Des". And whaddya know! You quickly find that your friend is talking about The Daleks' Master Plan — without ever having to go to the article!

Limitations

Only works in main namespace

This is very much a beta test. I've poked the tires on it and don't have too many worries about the accuracy of the results or its responsiveness.

As long as we're talking about the main namespace.

But it has absolutely no ability to show results from other namespaces. So if you're looking for a file or a category, forget it.

Now, if you happen to know the correct name for a page outside the main namespace, then you can still use the search bar to get there. For instance, if you type in "Category:Floor 500" or "Transmat:Doctor Who" into the search bar, you will go there.

But in order to actually find something whose name you don't remember, you're going to have to go to Special:Search, click the "Advanced" tab, and select the namespaces you want to look in.

New articles not included

This feature only works on articles that were created prior to a few hours before 15:55, December 4, 2013 (UTC).

So if you make an article right now, you won't be able to find it using the search bar. Again, you'll be able to get there by typing the exact, correct name into search. But it won't show up in the list of suggestions.

No ability to turn it off

Unlike our VisualEditor beta test, there is no preference you can set to opt out and get the old search back.

So why are we doing this?

You may be saying to yourself, "Those are some big damn limitations." Yeah, they are. We and Wikia know it.

But here's why we're doing it now:

• This is a limited-time experiment. It runs only until the end of December
• We have a lot of visitors to the site right now. Last week, we had 4 million visitors. So we can provide Wikia with some valuable data in a high-use situation
• Sometime next year, this will become the search engine. Since it's an inevitability, we might as well participate in the product's development. It is always better for communities to have an opportunity to comment on new product development than to simply have it forced onto them.

In other words, the main reason we're participating is because fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to — oh, sorry, wrong franchise. Anyway, point is, the more you know about a change, and the more you can participate in the change, the less you'll worry about it.

So what do I do?

Get in there and really road test this feature. When you notice search results that don't make sense, come back here and tell us exactly what you did, and what weird results you got.