Mobile apps, along with some tests being done on the portals, utilize prefix search as a generator to retrieve page properties such as thumbnails of the page images. We should support this in the completion suggester as well so it can be used in more places.
This can most directly be done by adjusting how we integrate with the prefix search abstraction in core.
This is pretty important if we want the completion suggester to be adopted by API clients such as mobile web and the mobile apps.
Helpful comment from @Anomie about this: "It also turns out that if you do action=opensearch, you should get list=prefixsearch (and generator=prefixsearch) for free since both modules use the TitlePrefixSearch class as their backend."
Adding this into the sprint, since it's a blocker for a full rollout of the completion suggester.
Change 266596 had a related patch set uploaded (by Smalyshev):
[WIP] Refactor completion search to use SearchEngine
Change 265874 had a related patch set uploaded (by Smalyshev):
[WIP] Add completion suggester for prefix search hook
Maybe this technical cleanup of core is worth a nice note to wikitech-l or a blog post? There are often a lot of complaints about crufty code in core, and we're doing something to fix it, here.
@Deskana good idea, once we have the API more or less finalized, I'll write one for wikitech-l. I'll write heads up for discovery in case something wants to comment while it is being done.