Some time in the past week, quoted phrase insource searches stopped working. Typing
insource:"could of"
in the search box should return a list of articles with the phrase "could of" in the source, and it used to. Now it returns a list of articles with "could" and "of" in the source, just like
insource:could insource:of
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fix incategory, insource and intitle with double quoted values | mediawiki/extensions/CirrusSearch | master | +57 -14 |
I don't know how tongue-in-cheek "it's a feature" was meant, but I don't find anything in T111293 that suggests someone thinks this was a positive change. It's more likely just a simple programming error, of a fairly common type: the system passes the search string through some interface in which quotation marks mean something, with the effect that they are effectively stripped out of the search string before they reach the thing that actually does the searching.
The comments do, however, suggest a workaround: embedding additional quotation marks within the search string makes a pair of them survive so the effect is what was intended. Example: insource:"\"could of\"" .
Change 236544 had a related patch set uploaded (by Thiemo Mättig (WMDE)):
Fix incategory, insource and intitle with double quoted values
Change 236544 merged by jenkins-bot:
Fix incategory, insource and intitle with double quoted values