Woogle Help

From TeamWeaverWiki

Woogle is an alternative to the built-in search of this Wiki. This page explains the features and usage of Woogle.

Searching with Woogle

Woogle is currently configured as the default search for this Wiki - i.e. you can use the normal search box on any page to start a Woogle search (this feature can be disabled in your MediaWiki preferences - see configuration settings).

The Woogle main search form is accessible directly via the MediaWiki Special Page Special:Woogle.

In the Woogle search form, you can also restrict your search to certain repositories or datatypes.

Woogle Pages

In Woogle, each search request can be represented as a Wiki page - e.g. Woogle:Test. Thus, you can start a discussion about a search, but also create a small wiki page for each search request. Such pages can be used to elaborate on the information need, or to convey tipps on searching that topic for fellow users.

Search-term autocompletion

Woogle can suggest search terms by providing an autocompletion feature on the search input field. Once you type more than three characters, a small pop-up will appear and provide a list of related terms. Clicking these terms will search for them. Currently, autocomplete only suggests single query terms. Term suggestions stem from all words used in the title and content of Wiki pages.

OpenSearch

Some web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox offer a quick search bar to directly launch searches on external sites. Woogle will be automatically recognized by the browsers when you are browsing your Wiki.Since Woogle might enable access to other data sources than just the Wiki, there are two different options - either to search the Wiki content only, or to search all content available to Woogle.

Search syntax

Woogle does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase input. If you enter more than a single search term, Woogle will find all documents containing both terms (logical AND). Woogle also supports wildcards (?, *) and phrase search (e.g. "Hello World").

Woogle Alerts

A Wiki is a dynamic system, in a sense that content is never complete, but all pages might be improved at any time by the users. MediaWiki acknowledges this fact by allowing to "watch" pages to get notifications on later changes. Woogle generalizes this concepts by introducing WoogleAlerts. By using the built-in "watch" meachanism on Woogle:Search pages, users can be notified on the creation and changes on Wiki pages which contain arbitrary query terms. Example: to get notified on any creation or change of a page or attached file mentioning "Tim Berners-Lee", you need to search for "Tim Berners-Lee" and select "watch" on the upcoming search page Woogle:Tim Berners-Lee.

Knowledge Sharing

Woogle uses statistical information from the Wiki (inlinks) and about search queries to rank Wiki pages not yet existing ("red links"). Red links with a high demand will be highlighted with an asterisk ("*") within the Wiki. If you move your mouse on a red link, Woogle will display information about the demand for that content.

Via Special:WoogleStatistics you can see additional statistics about popular searches, results and more.

Woogle Configuration

Besides global configuration by the Wiki administrator, Woogle allows for user-defined preferences. You can customize various settings using the "Woogle"-tab in the main MediaWiki preference pages (Special:Preferences). You can change:

• General settings
  • "Use Woogle" - if you want to use Woogle features in this Wiki
  • "Replace built-in search with Woogle" - if Woogle should be launched when using the MediaWiki search field
• Privacy
  • "Log clicks and queries (anonymously)" - if your queries and clicks can be stored in an aggregated fashion
  • "Random user ID" - random userId used for query and instrumentation logging
• Scientific evaluation (may not be enabled in your Wiki)
  • "Participate in evaluation" - revoke or affirm your participation in the evaluation (see below for more info)
  • "Group" - evaluation group assigned (you can not change this)

Privacy

Woogle tracks and analyzes query and result click data to optimize the search process and to identify desired content. However, Woogle does not maintain a detailed search history of every user, but stores only aggregated and anonymized query information. In particular, each unique query term and each combination of a query term and a search result are represented by one entry in the database. For these entries, the database stores the first, last and average time the query resp. click was executed and the anonymized user id for every user issueing that query. Note that this is far less data than recorded in typical web server access logs.

Woogle Feedback

You can give feedback to your Wiki administrator via Special:WoogleFeedback. For general feedback, please visit [1].

About Woogle

Woogle is OpenSource and has been developed by FZI Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. You can find more information on Woogle on mediawiki.org and on teamweaver.org.