In MediaWiki, is it possible to capture user search terms that don't return results?

Question

That is, is there a way to log what people are searching for but are not getting any results in order to tell me where I need to add/improve the documentation so they get a result?

Answer 1

There are various ways to do this. If you have access to the Apache server logs, the simplest approach may be to add a transparent image to [[MediaWiki:Search-nonefound]] using wikisyntax ([[File:Transparent.gif]]), then watch for requests for this image in your (combined, not common) Apache server logs.

You should see log entries that look something like the following, when a user executes a search with 0 results:

127.0.0.1 - - [10/Mar/2010:18:02:05 -0500] "GET /images/Transparent.gif HTTP/1.1" 304 - "http://127.0.0.1/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=simpsons&go=Go" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10"

In this case, the failed search was for simpsons.