At the moment we have a big discussion in Russian Wikipedia that the search engine is working worse than previous one [1].
The key of the problem is that we have a gadget that suggests wiki-links for a selected word based on the internal search results.
I am also posting link to the gadget itself here for information[2] but the issue is connected not with it but with the search itself as we still can't understand its logics.
We gathered some examples of the search results:
1) searching for the following article - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Гагарин,_Юрий_Алексеевич:
- intitle:Юри* intitle:Гагари* >> returns https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Юрино_%28Гагаринский_район%29
- intitle:Юр* intitle:Гагари* >> returns 26 articles, Yuri Gagarin is the first in the list
2) searching for - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Феофан_Затворник
- intitle:Феофа* intitle:Затворни* >> the article is found
- intitle:Феофан* intitle:Затворни* >> 0 results
- intitle:Феофан intitle:Затворник* >> the article is found
- intitle:Феофан intitle:З* >> 0 results
- "Феофан Затворни*" >> 0 results
- "Феофан Затворник*" >> the article is found
3) searching for - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Иван_Грозный
- Иван Гр* >> 4000+ articles found, the first in the list is https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Гражданская_война_в_России ; no article about Ivan the Great (Иван Грозный) in first 500 results
- Иван Гро* >> 2600+ results, the article is found on the first place
- intitle:Иван intitle:Гр* >> 10 results, the article isn't found
- intitle:Иван intitle:Гро* >> now its 25 results, the article is found on the first place
4) searching for - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Болотов,_Василий_Васильевич
- Болотов В. В. >> 10k+ results, the article is found on the first place due to the existing redirect
- Болотов В В >> 10k results, the article is found on the first place
- Болотов В* В* >> 10k results, the article is somewhere around 200th place in search results
- intitle:Болотов В* В* >> 147 results, the article is found on the first place
- intitle:Болото* В* В* >> 29 results, the article not found
- intitle:Болото* intitle:В* intitle:В* >> 0 results
- intitle:Болотов intitle:В* intitle:В* >> 3 results, the required article not found but the incorrect result is on the first place - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Болотов,_Валерий_Дмитриевич
[1]: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Форум/Технический#.D0.92.D0.B8.D0.BA.D0.B8.D1.81.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D1.8C.D1.89.D0.B8.D0.BA
[2]: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-wikilinker.js