Item827: default search box to "all public webs"

think about this typical use case:

user browses to http://foswiki.org , types in a search term into the search box and (surprise!) gets no matches in the Home web.

let's default this to search all webs. can it be set for just the Home web? or should we enable "all webs" search for the search box in every web?

-- WillNorris - 21 Jan 2009

"All webs" for all webs would be the only thing that leads to predictabily.

-- ArthurClemens - 21 Jan 2009

Done.

-- ArthurClemens - 07 Feb 2009

Is there a SitePreference for this?

-- JayenAshar - 02 Nov 2011

No, but there probably should be. It's worth raising an enhancement task for it - a comment on a closed tasks is likely to be forgotten/ignored

-- PaulHarvey - 04 Nov 2011

Thanks for not ignoring me! Item11236 opened.

-- JayenAshar - 04 Nov 2011

Are we able to have the Search Feature default to all webs and sub webs yet? We are having a bit of time getting this up and running

-- MatthewGonter - 30 Jun 2014

The out-of-the-box search engine in Foswiki defaults to searching the current web for performance reasons. Defaulting search to a broader scope might not be sensible for installs with loads of webs. Even searching all webs on foswiki.org is not giving you good results. The other reason better not to search all webs is that the oob search engine can't sort results found across webs according to relevance. Results will always be displayed partitioned into webs where each part of the result set is then sorted and displayed individually, again for performance and legacy reasons.

Unfortunately I'd regard this a dead end for further optimization.

Instead I'd strongly recommend SolrPlugin for any serious Foswiki installation to replace the default fulltext search engine. With it there's no performance difference between searching all or just some webs for results.

-- MichaelDaum - 01 Jul 2014

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