Hi Pine,

Thanks for reaching out with your questions. I'm hoping that what I've written below will give you some answers of what we're working on.

tl;dr - we're working on it ;)

The Discovery Search team have been quite busy over the last few quarters working on getting the backend quicker and more accurate in serving up search results with our updated completion suggester and it really does show on our dashboard for zero results returned. However, we still have lots of work to do, including updating the elasticsearch cluster and logstash.

We've got a quite a few tickets in Phabricator to investigate how we can do searches across projects and languages. One such ticket is to detect if the user used the 'wrong' keyboard when typing in their search on the en/ru Wikipedias using a Russian/American keyboard. We also have a TextCat demo that you might want to check out and using wikidata aliases and descriptions are also generally being looked at. 
 
Additionally, on our backlog is to improve 'fuzzy' full text searches to return more meaningful results. Because the autocomplete and full text algorithms are very different, this can cause odd results in some cases. One option we'll can take a look at is if the full text algorithm doesn't return any results, run that same search through the completion suggester. It would take additional time on the backend of course, to run this additional search with the added difficulty in that the completion suggester doesn't run the elasticsearch highlighter. 

We also are looking at how to handle question marks (?) in a search query and to design a page that would display search results, across languages, in a meaningful manner to our user, that might be able to show redirects better as well. 

Whew...lots going on, so stay tuned!

Cheers,

Deb


--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation

On Mon, Jul 4, 2016 at 9:35 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Discovery,

Following up on conversation from last week's Metrics Meeting:

* If user 1 enters search term X in language A on a.wikipedia.org and there are no article or redirect title results on that wiki for X, can we show them search results for X automatically translated into other languages on wikis where an article or redirect does exist for the translated term?

* If user 2 enters search term Y in language b on c.wikipedia.org and there are no article or redirect title results on that wiki for Y, can we show them search results for Y on b.wikipedia.org?

* What is the status of integrating Wiktionary search results into Wikipedia search results?

* Have there been any initiatives to integrate Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikisource, Commons, and other project search results into Wikipedia search results, including with options for multilingual search as mentioned above?

Thanks!

Pine


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