bingle-admin wrote:

Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/mobile/cards/1477

Interestingly searching for "Bara" works but "bara" doesn't.

http://test2.m.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&search=bara&action=opensearch&namespace=0&limit=15
On Firefox returns ["bara",[]] in response
On Chrome returns ["bara",["Barack Obama"]] in response

Why would the response differ on user agent?! This is server side!?!

also see this issue at at https://m.mediawiki.org for both Firefox/http and Chrome/https

I had a look at this and it is certainly not caused by cirrussearch.

I know it isn't caused by CirrusSearch because digging into this caused me to see that Cirrus isn't enabled _anywhere_. This is a mistake and we'll get it back enabled on test2wiki in a bit.

It does seem to be specific to the word "bara" though. "bar" and "barac" both find him. This could be complicated by caching.....

After chatting a bit with Nik in IRC, I'm becoming more convinced this is a caching issue. I'm able to replicate the OP's issue in firefox as a logged out user, but if I log in, search behaves as expected. When I log out and try to search, things work as expected (presumably caching is varied on one, some or all of the cookies that linger after logging out).

I looked at the network requests, and sure enough the failing 'bara' search string results in a cache hit while the others result in a miss. So likely an error or otherwise bad result got stuck in the cache.

Chris, what search term(s) did you try on mediawiki.org?

Arthur is looking into this so marking as assigned.

I feel like we can safely close this - the OP issue appears to be gone. I just tried and could no longer replicate with 'bara'. Iirc the cache entry expired Dec 4 ~1800 GMT. New response headers from 'bara' search show cache entry refreshed Dec 4 ~1900 GMT and expires Dec 5 ~1900GMT. I have a high level of confidence that a bad response/error was cached and was causing the problem. Marking as closed but feel free to reopen if issue resurfaces.