Hello, Wikipedia.org search bar detects surnames very poorly. With Spanish configuration, if you type "Schumac", you get a disambiguation page (ok), Henrich Schumacher (rather ok) and several odd plants (???), instead of famous sports personalities Michael Schumacher or Toni Schumacher. If you type "Ferre", you get Ferrero Rocher (ok), a random Spanish noble (???) and several tiny villages (???), instead of actor Will Ferrell, or even worse, ferretería!.
Topic on Talk:Wikipedia.org updated page layout/Flow
Thanks for your input - I'll pass this onto our Search team team. :)
There's some thinking that using DEFAULTSORT would help in this capacity. There's even a related Phabricator task. That is to say, the team is aware!
I checked the search function in RU, and I must say it is brilliant. It finds exactly what I was looking for, alternative suggestions are useful, and it even ignores minor typos when searchingю E.g. "Пшкин" returns "Пушкин" as intended and then "Пекин", which is a very good guess, and then "Пушкин (город)", which is also a good alternative. Well done! Hope you can replicate this for ES.
Russian Wikipedia makes it a lot easier to search by surnames, since articles seem to generally be named "Surname, FirstName", so the prefix matching the suggestions use works really well on surnames. As CKoerner (WMF) mentioned, it looks like the DEFAULTSORT task could help on wikis where "FirstName Surname" is the usual standard. (Also, on the ticket, I talk more about how actually searching makes up for a lot of the shortcomings of the autocomplete suggestions—though in general they are really wonderful.)