Wiki Needs Search Terms

With wiki getting ever bigger, I find it harder and harder to find stuff I know exists somewhere. I wonder if it is not time to introduce "search terms" that provide synonyms for the topic. It would not require a change to the wiki engine, but rather a convention.

Example page bottom:

See Also: FooBar, BlahBlah?, ExampleOnly?

Search Terms: Finding, Searching, Google, Text Query

CategoryFooBar?

Pardon? [it is an example only]

Hmm... what would this provide that the category system doesn't already give us? Not that I'm dismissing it, but I fail to see the added value.

Agreed. If a search term is really valuable, it should be a category.

Categories usually don't cover synonyms. For example, somebody might think to search for "job" and "career", but not "employment" as in CategoryEmployment.

[It's likely that searching for a synonym will at least turn up pages in relevant categories.]

I concede that I do have trouble sometimes finding pages I know I have seen on wiki. But I see the problem of refinding them more in the less-than-optimal linking rather than the missing search terms. I think most search terms are presumably already present somewhere in the page. But I think that GoogleLovesWiki no longer, thus the full text search no longer works reliably. -- GunnarZarncke

Well, there are two ways to handle this. First would be an engine extension, which is a bad idea. The problem with this approach is that it goes against the principles of wiki. It requires metadata, and metadata is often incomplete and thus useless. Better approaches generally involve the reverse, which is the use of the page data to develop metadata (such as the Category system - simply an interesting use of backlinks).

For wiki to work better for searching, the searching itself must be improved, not the page content. For alternate, related terms, a simple and judicious application of "see also" should solve the problem. Redundant synonyms and alternate namings should not be deleted, but refactored into references to the main reference. For example, CeeSharp simply forwards the reader to CsharpLanguage. Judicious usage of similar mechanisms, combined with google-style referential searching, would prevent maintaining annoying keyword metadata.

Alternatively, if a convention of "search terms" is used but no extension is added, it creates its own problems. Using keywords is unreliable, as it requires reading the mind of the user to guess what a searcher will be looking for. Also, the keywords would be inadequately weighted against the noise in the document. Instead, let them just search the body, and return hits based on references and backlinks. -- MartinZarate

Well, would it hurt to make it possible to search for multiple words? Like "mathematics diplomat" would certainly trim down the number of pages found, vs simply "mathematics" or "diplomat." No, don't ask why I thought of that combo.

Alternatively, a quoted string? I know that "foo" occurs just before "bar" in only three or four documents, but I can't search for "foo bar" as a string. Just "foo" or "bar" -- or have I missed something?