The satisfaction metric is for all searches across all wikis. This includes searches on wiktionarys.
I don't think putting new information, such as Portuguese results on Spanish Wikipedia, is going to have nearly the same level of impact as improving the existing search results. We have an incredible amount of information within the individual wiki's that we fail to surface. The existing scoring algorithms are naive and don't even begin to incorperate the things the world has learned in the last 20 years. For example one of the factors we use as an indicator of relevance is the number of incoming links, but almost 20 years ago two PhD students from Stanford described a significantly better way, called PageRank. I think we would be much better off integrating the learning's of the last 20 years than naively just throwing more data into the pile and hoping something better comes out.
Erik B
Erik Bernhardson, 05/11/2015 22:56:
My concern is that our current user satisfaction metric suggests 15% of
users are happy with the results they are getting. This is really bad. I
would prefer to see us focus on search relevance and improving the
scoring of what we already have before spending more focus on interwiki
search.
What expense? The code for interwiki search is ready, only https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96881 needs fixing AFAIK. I agree that inlining the interwiki results is a bit harder, maybe that can be done later.
15 % is a low satisfaction (but is that en.wiki? en.wiki has lots of garbage of course), sure. On the bright side, that means it's easy to improve. To make up numbers: if even just 3 % of users search dictionary definitions on Wikipedia, interwiki search could increase the pool of happy users by 20 %. ;-)
Nemo
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