Not sure when this happened, but just noticing that "find this phrase" now returns results with "find", "this", and "phrase" anywhere instead of the expected behavior. I'm assuming this isn't intentional...
Topic on Talk:Search/Old/status
Doesn't seem to be happening anymore. Ok, it doesn't seem to happen in a consistent way, which is driving me nuts, so I'm switching back to old search for now. Example case: "pacific electric" search on commons is sneaking in results with "pacific gas & electric", etc... probably not a big deal for some purposes, but for rounding up files to batch process, not so great. :/
I don't _believe_ I've changed the behavior of cirrus with regards to double quotes on commons. I'm going to be swapping out the component that does the highlighting with another one that is faster. It is currently deployed on test, test2, wikidatatest, and mediawiki.org. It doesn't support limiting the results to matching phrases at the moment but I'm fixing it. What I believe your seeing is that Cirrus's default phrase slop is 1 rather then 0. In other words, one word in between is OK. I'll switch it to 0 this week. You can actually control the slop by putting ~0 after the phrase. So "pacific electric"~0 will get you what you want. It just isn't intuitive and I'll fix that.
Yes, I'm pretty sure now that I just wasn't tripping over the slop feature enough to notice it at first. Thanks very much for the ~0 workaround, that's useful information to have. If it's documented somewhere, I missed it, but if it's made clear in the basic search syntax guide, then the slop may not be such a terrible default setting. I don't really know what the "normal" user expectation about this behavior is. :)
EDIT: I found this, but it states that "closer to 1 is less fuzzy"... which is backwards, isn't it? Ok, it works differently for phrases and single terms. Should have read a little bit more, sorry. I think I'm gonna need a cheat sheet.
I updated it to make it more clear, I hope. If you have ideas for what cheat sheet should look like please start one and I'll work on it!
Well, I just meant something like this... of course, having made it, I feel like I won't need it, but I'm always wrong when I assume that. ;)
If you move it to Help namespace here on mediawiki.org we can later also translate it.
If you think it's worth translating, you're more than welcome to copy it to any appropriate place, but please look it over first to make sure it actually makes sense to someone other than me...