Cross-posting from wikitech-l. Please discuss there.

Dan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Garry <dgarry@wikimedia.org>
Date: 10 August 2015 at 14:36
Subject: Maximum search query length coming soon
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Hello!

The Search Team in the Discovery Department is implementing a maximum search query length. There are two main reasons to do this:
  1. Extremely long queries are almost always gibberish from things like malfunctioning scrapers. These queries skew our statistics about the usefulness of our search. Implementing a limit will reduce the magnitude of skew.
  2. Extremely long queries have a disproportionate impact on performance. On its own this isn't enough, but considering point 1 above, limiting them is unlikely to impact any actual users. Implementing a limit will improve performance.
We've chosen a hard limit of 300 characters. If your query exceeds this, you will be told that your query exceeds the maximum length. Based on our analysis of typical query lengths, this change should impact almost nobody. If you think you'll be adversely affected, please reach out to us and we'll work with you to figure something out.

Thanks!

Dan

--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation



--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation