Ah - silly me. All this time I have been using "Wiki Search". Search for "virtual"
Index returned: 11
Wiki Search returned: 186
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2012/3/1 John Repucci :

As usual, the wiki returns rubbish, 100% of the time!

eg: Go to the Index page, type in "freebsd" (without the quotes). Make sure Main is select in the ComboBox, and click Go. You get lots or results [and you think cool, this works. Well, not really.]. Click on the "tiOPF" result. Now do a search [using your web browser's search function] for the word "freebsd". The tiOPF wiki page doesn't mention ANYWHERE the word "freebsd". WTF?

What's the point of having a search or index when it always spits out garbage!

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

What's the point of having a search or index when it always spits out garbage!

This is why I vote for decent offline help for all aspects of Lazarus, IDE, Language, LCL, RTL, ...

I was happy to get to know that Mathias and you are working on a tool to export the Wiki content to offline help viewer file format, so that a (multiple file) offline viewer should be enabled to search the complete available documentation and find the requested information in any of the chapters.

-Michael

No it doesn't, at least for me.

eg: Go to the Index page, type in "freebsd" (without the quotes). Make sure Main is select in the ComboBox, and click Go.

As someone else said somewhere:

The index page lists page titles, page titles are equal to the pages names.

What's the point of having a search or index when it always spits out garbage!

I typed "Freebsd" into the "wiki search" input box and it returned two 100% hits and, as you're asking for IIUC, it searches the pages text and returns hits from that search.

Look:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Special:Search?search=freebsd&go=Go

I van't see what's wrong with that.

I agree, I did expect to see the page "FreeBSD" in the index list. But there is a trick regarding case sensitivity. If you type in "Free*" instead of "Freebsd" - note, many if not all user of free BSD write it's name "FreeBSD", not "freebsd" - you get what you are searching for.

Same holds true for tiopf, that can be named "TiOPF", tiopf", tiOPF" as main cases.

Conclusion:
- Index search work fine.
- Remember the index is case sensitive and use it smart.
- Maybe the search logic could be changed. If one knows it's working OK, but since it is unusual I have stepped into this pit multiple times myself.
- Beofre changing the wiki it's easier to use google or another good public search engine similarly capable. There cpould be a link on the wikis main page for doing so.

(This took me 10 minutes to find out myself ;)