After extensive testing over the last several months using a new search query scoring method called BM25 (Best Matching) [1], we recently completed a limited
production
release to the following top languages: English, German, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch and Arabic. This new release is replacing the older search method called tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) [2].
We have
additional
testing to do [3,4] to figure out if BM25 will work in languages that don’t use spaces in-between their words
,
i.e.: Japanese, Chinese, etc.
The Discovery team announces much of
our
completed work in weekly status updates [5
, 6
], but some of the work isn’t actually obvious to anyone who uses our search engine
- t
hat is because it isn’t actually ‘live’ until a complete re-index of the servers occur. We’ve created a recurring ticket in Phabricator [
7
] to keep track of the work that goes live
in production
after a re-index, such as the one we’ve also just completed. A few
highlights
of the
recent
re-index
are implementing ascii-folding for the French language and