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