Upcoming work for Discovery for the rest of Q2: completion suggester beta features, page views influencing result ranking - Discovery

26 Nov 2015

As we reach the last month of the quarter, it's a good opportunity for us
to reflect on where we want to go for the last part of our remaining time.

On the one hand, we're in quite a good place. We're just wrapping up our
work on our Q2 goal for search
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q2_Goals#Search>,
which is excellent! On the other hand, the test showed minimal impact, so
our users still aren't seeing the impact of our work. Since we can continue
running A/B tests for improving language support relatively cheaply in
terms of required engineering time, let's take a look back at what we've
done previously and see if we can choose something high impact to work on!

The completion suggester is a very promising avenue for us to invest in. As
noted in our analysis of the initial test
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111858>, using the completion suggester
instead of prefixsearch significantly reduced the zero results rate. We've
not had an impact on this through other efforts, so this is interesting! In
order to more thoroughly test the suggester, we can make it a Beta Feature
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119535>. This will allow editors to
opt-in to testing it, and will gather us valuable qualitative feedback
about what use cases the completion suggester could support better. The
caveat, of course, is that the feedback will be from a specific segment of
our user base (users who test beta features) which is more specialised than
the intended audience (everyone). That said, the feedback will still be
very helpful. There's quite a bit of work to do here; our initial test of
the suggester was very hacky, but now that it's proven itself, we can be
more rigorous.

The other avenue is using page views to influence result ranking. This is
in an earlier stage thant he completion suggester, in that it's a
relatively unproven approach for us, but it's something that's logical and
that we've been interested in for a while. But, we've repeatedly had to
deprioritise it for other work. If something is popular, it makes sense to
rank it up in search results. Obviously, we do not want to be *too* aggressive
with this in case we create feedback loops, but I think the potential
benefits are quite clear if done correctly.

I explained a lot of this more briefly in our last standup, but hopefully
this should give you all some guidance on where we're going.

Thanks, and as always, if there are any questions then please let me know.

Dan

-- 
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation