Search is fundamental to any information storage system, Pier has a high-quality search feature composed of the plain open box, commonly found at the top of the page. In the past it allowed search for multiple terms using an OR for the terms, for a large wiki this can return too many results.

We have the option of searching with negative (-) to eliminate, such as searching for -searching will find all of the comments under this post, but not the post itself. If one wants to search for either of two terms, they can search for the first, then search for the second and not the first (or do an individual search for each term and eliminate the duplicates manually). If an OR is used between search terms, then finding only pages with both substrings is not as easy.

Before I had write access to the main Pier repository, I added changes to an extension for:

PRFullTextSearch>>visitStructure:

The changes updated acceptToken replacing #anySatisfy: with #allSatisfy:, if multiple terms needed an or, then multiple searches could be done. Unfortunately, when I was given write access, I updated something else an inadvertently removed PRSearchView>>refresh and helper functions. These were added back in Pier-Seaside version 558 and Pier-Model version 452.

Search Feedback

The search tool can be further enhanced by displaying what was searched - I've had the experience of What was this page a search for? for several tabs. Adding to the renderResultsOn:

	html paragraph: 'Search for "' , self query , '" results:'.

and adding to the renderNoResultsOn:

	html paragraph: 'Your search for "' , self query , '" yielded no results.'.