Take a look at this:

Search on Wikipedia -- in the Wikipedia name space -- for "Spellmanloves67 continues to restore material"...

It doesn't return any results.

Yet, a page exists in Wikipedia name space with that quoted phrase.

Has Wikipedia disabled or deprecated search of its own "Wikipedia" name space? There's something just not working right, that's all I know.

Greg

Works for me —

Spellmanloves67 continues

Jon

That's Google, Jon. Ha ha, but even weirder, now the Wikipedia-resident search DOES return the page in question, though the red highlighting is way off.

Something bizarre is going on. Monkey around with it. You'll see what I mean.

Greg

Yeah, I did that the first time.

I don't think it does exact phrase, so it's flagging on the word "to" instead of the more significant words in your phrase.

Jon

No, it doesn't.

Mediawiki search blows.

Somehow the search has gotten worse though, hasn't it? I do not ever remembering it being this bad.

Greg picked what happens to be a pathologically bad case - I don't think it's gotten worse generally, it's just bad overall.

Perhaps. I don't remember what I was doing recently, maybe I phrase searching like Greg was, but the media wiki search showed no results and I had to do the search through google. That brings up an interesting point because of the request to "no-index" Wikipedia namespace and other pages so that google does not crawl them. This type of research would be impossible if google did not crawl them!

Perhaps that's the idea.