For a while now, I’ve thought that the search on wiki.mozilla.org sucked. But it could be that it doesn’t suck nearly as hard as I thought, because I went to my Preferences page, on the Search tab, and noticed that large sections of the wiki were not being searched by default. Which might explain why I wasn’t finding things.
So if you have had a similar experience, you should check and see whether this might be the solution.
THBAPSA.
Yeah, mediawiki’s search abilities look good on paper, but in practice they can be rather awkward. In terms of default namespaces being searched. That’s configurable by the server admin.
And if you’re not logged in at all you get the crap defaults?
@Boris: Anything you set in your Preferences (such as a skin, a timezone, or — as mentioned here — namespaces to search) applies only when you are logged-in as that user. (I suppose you could register more than one usernames and log in as one or another. It might be against policy, though.) Of course, when you aren’t logged-in, no Preferences come into play, and you get the site’s defaults — whether or not they are crap is a matter of opinion.
Boris: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=572330 .
Gerv