[Wikimedia-search] 500K multilingual wikipedia zero-results queries

Hi everyone, I've broadened my analysis from enwiki to the other larger wikis, looking at the same phenomena I found in enwiki. While the DOI searches are definitely an issue across 25 wikis, with the other earlier-identified issues some are cross-wiki and some are not. *TL;DR: After DOI searches, "unix timestamp" searches are the biggest cross-wikipedia issue. Weird AND queries and quot queries are big contributors on enwiki, which make them important overall. We could easily fix the unix timestamp queries (either auto correct or make suggestions), and we could fix lots of the quot queries. All of these could be included in the category of "automata" that could potentially be separated from regular queries, and it wouldn't hurt to track down their sources and help people search better.* The <unix-timestamp-looking number>:<wiki title> format (with a small number with a space after the colon) is spread across 45 wikis, with 28,089 instances out of 500K (~5.6%). More than half of the results are enwiki (15,961), but there are 3133 on ru, 2986 on it, 1889 on ja, and hundreds on tr, fa, nl, ar, he, hi, id, and cs. At a cursory glance, all seem to be largely named entities or queries in the appropriate language. Removing the "14###########:", tracking down the source, or putting this on the automata list would help a lot. The boolean AND queries are largely in enwiki (17607: ~3.5% overall, ~7.9% in enwiki), and they are a mixed bag, but many (626) appear with quot, and most (16657) are of the form "article_title_with_underscore" AND "article title without underscores" where the first half is repeated over and over and the second half is something linked to in the first article. Find the source and add to the automata list. In plwiki (263), the AND queries are all of the form *<musical thing>* AND (muzyk* OR Dyskografia) where <musical thing> seems to be an artist, band, album, or something similar. This looks like an automaton, but may not be worth pursuing. Similarly the ones from nl. Globally, OR queries are much more common. 46,035 (~9.2%), spread much more evenly over all the wikis. These are almost all the DOI queries. quot is totally an enwiki thing. It's ~1.2% overall and ~2.8% in enwiki in this sample, which is a lot for one small thing. We should either create a secondary search with filtered quot or track down the source and help them figure out how to do better. TV episodes and films ("<title> S#E#" film) are mostly on enwiki (~1.1% overall, ~2.4% of enwiki queries), with some on ja, fr, and de, and single digits on it and ru. I'd count this as automata, though finding a source would be nice. Strings of numbers do happen everywhere, but are only common on enwiki, with less on jawiki, and much less on de, fr, ru, vi, and nl. My last bit of analysis will later this week, and I'll try to look at non-English and/or cross-wiki stuff, write it all up in Phabricator, and move on. On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Trey Jones &lt;tjones(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: