Search Thoughts

This page is some initial thoughts and experiments with searching the Federated Wiki sites.

I have realised that my wiki-writing has been using it as a personal writing space: it helps me to think and to formulate my thoughts if I want to communicate them to others. I also use it to annotate links I found.

The neighbourhood I usually search comes from people I know, so I find their wiki and reference it on my site: Ward, Mike, David etc.

At the same time I moan about the fact that many people I know use different tools for publishing that I can't federate properly - GitHub, MediaWiki, email (damn email, for publishing?), and Evernote. So I decided that I should crawl the Federation a bit more and get connected with people who already use Federated Wiki for their own purposes, so that I don't feel lonely.

First I started to look at what people I reference fork from, and finally came across search.fed.wiki.org . This search is a bit weird - for example if I look for the word "trust" in this search and tick "sites" it will give me a bunch of welcome pages of the wikis that might have the word trust mentioned in them.

To find a page, not a wiki, I can either tick "page" when I search, which will give me a bunch of pages (and takes a while to load) or I click on each welcome page individually and do an inner search, which, afaik, searches the first paragraph of the pages in that single site or its neighbourhood, provided there is one.

Weird thing is, that many of the sites which the search.fed.wiki.org suggests when I request "trust" in "sites" don't find the word I was looking for in the "inner search"