Hello,

tl;dr - we’re running a second test for displaying sister projects in the search results (with new link highlights) on 8 wikis for a week; starting today, with apologies for sending to multiple email lists.

As a follow up to a recent A/B test that the Discovery Search team conducted, we’ll be running a second test for displaying sister project search results in a sidebar on several wiki’s search engine results page (SERP) - starting today. You can read the draft report or browse the next two paragraphs for the biggest concerns.

We realized that when we display the results from the sister projects, it might not have been intuitive to our visitors that there were links that could be clicked to go to individual articles and to additional search results, so, we’ve added blue links to the results.

We also discovered that the smaller wikis in which we had originally chosen to test on, might not have had enough relevant results in their sister projects to be displayed. To remedy that, we reached out to the community and added 4 larger wikis along with the original 4 wikis, to test on. The list is as follows: Persian, Italian, Catalan, Polish, Russian, French, German, and Arabic. 

Here are a few links that will not affect our testing, but will demonstrate the new test display:

• cawiki: https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=manifestaci%C3%B3&fulltext=1&cirrusUserTesting=recall_sidebar_results&searchToken=66xv5qgi97musdtybgwik11sk#manifestaci%C3%B3
• dewiki: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=regenbogen&fulltext=1&cirrusUserTesting=recall_sidebar_results&searchToken=44wgqit3kykji2o1cxtaxlzcs#regenbogen
• arwiki: https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%D9%82%D9%88%D8%B3+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%B1&fulltext=1&cirrusUserTesting=recall_sidebar_results&searchToken=bxfe1fnvj7sav1nue56hpjt69#%D9%82%D9%88%D8%B3%2B%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%B1

You can edit the url to change the search term and also change to a different Wikipedia. For example, try this url for “apple pie” on enwiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=apple+pie&fulltext=1&cirrusUserTesting=recall_sidebar_results&searchToken=8mavijx36f9cl26l6k2v2o11l#apple%2Bpie 

Let us know what you think!

Cheers from the Discovery Search Team

--

deb tankersley

irc: debt

Product Manager, Discovery

Wikimedia Foundation

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