There is no such thing as the perfect tool. You will always find something that you don’t like - for PukiWiki, my wiki engine, it’s the search mechanism. There are two things that bug me: First the search results are sorted alphabetically, which is fine, but differentiated by small and capital letters. Meaning that words starting with the same letter can possibly be found in two places within the same list.

The second thing I don’t like, is that there is only one result list. For me different result types can be differentiated: You type in a name of a page you know exists or you just look for pages containing the search term. And pages could contain the term in the name and/or in its content.

That is why I divided the search result list in three parts: a) pages with the exact same name, b) pages with the term in its title (and possibly in its content) and c) pages containing the term in its content.

This is how it looks:

Modifying PukiWiki is fairly easy. All you need to do is to open the file lib/func.php and to replace the do_search() function (in the current release 1.4.7 it starts at line 209 and ends at 287) with this code.

Save it and you are done.

Update: I also created a simple and clean skin for PukiWiki.