So I was looking up information on peripheral neuritis[0] and I accidentally mistyped it as "peripheral neuriti". The good news: the autocorrector worked out I'd done it wrong, corrected it, and sent me automatically to the right results. Yay![1]
But looking at the results I see a really obvious improvement we could make that would definitely improve the user experience in this scenario. See, if you look at the first article on the list you'll see it's "Peripheral neuropathy". Why? Because peripheral neuritis redirects to that. But the article header appears in the search results as "Peripheral neuropathy", since that's the real title.
But it's not what I searched for. What I searched for was neuritis. Is neuritis the same as neuropathy? I dunno, I'm a random reader. Is this a good search result to click on? No idea.
What I'd love for us to do is run an A/B test with two conditions:
1. Users who search for a term which redirects to an article get the current experience (control) 2. Users who search for a term which redirects to an article get the article title in the search results claiming to be the redirect title (test)
I bet this would really improve the clickthrough rate for this class of searches. It would definitely improve the UX.
[0] I'm researching thalidomide. Long story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=peripheral+neuriti&title=Spe...