Seeking comments of quality of search in Xwiki

Help / Discuss
#1

Greetings all,

I’m looking for a new Wiki to replace our existing, fairly extensive installation. The main complaint I have from current users (who are all technical), is that the searchability of the wiki is appalling. If you type timesheet, and the page you seek actually has the instance ‘timesheets’ it won’t return that page, if you put too many words in your search, it won’t return anything meaningful (which makes it very hard to do a fairly specific search). If you put too few words in your search, typically the results are far too large, and includes completely irrelevant pages. I have sought to use plugins, or tweak the search settings, but to no avail. There are other complaints with our existing system, so I am now seeking and alternative, and xwiki seems to be ticking all the boxes. However, searchability is one of those ones that it’s difficult to evaluate, so I’d be really grateful to hear how others experience search in xwiki. Yep, looking for subjective feedback if you’re willing!

Thanks in advance,
Jane.

#2

We pride ourselves in having a strong search implementation in XWiki but the best is that you try it by yourself. You can either install XWiki yourself (very easy with the demo packages) or try it live on http://playground.xwiki.org

See also http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Solr%20Search%20Application

#3

We use Apache Solr for our Search engine, which is one of the best implementations available in the Open Source. It includes all the features you need.

It’s still not perfect because pages that contain code are not executed before being indexed, which can causes some surprises. And sometimes we have some specific bugs such as XAFORUM-22. But overall, the search is quite good in XWiki.

As Vincent said, you can easily try XWiki by yourself and make your own opinion.

I hope it helps,

Guillaume