New subject: Secondary search results (e.g. language detection) now available over API

7 Jan 2017

Hello!

*tl;dr: add srenablerewrites=yes to your API search queries to enable
search results from different language projects*

The Search Team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery#Search:_Backend> is
thrilled to announce that secondary search results are now available over
the API. This means that automated language detection (provided by TextCat
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TextCat>) and query forwarding can now be
used by API consumers.

Here's the explanation. The Search Team's analysis of common search queries
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Survey_of_Zero-Results_Queries#Foreign_languages>
showed that there are quite a few search queries that aren't in the
language of the wiki the user is on. To help alleviate this problem, and
give users useful results, we added language detection and query
forwarding; for example, Луковичная глава
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=default&search=Луковичная+глава&fulltext=Search>
now
gives the user results from the Russian Wikipedia. This is the
functionality that's now available over the API, as you can see if you perform
the same search over the API
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=%D0%9B%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F+%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0&srenablerewrites=yes>
with the srenablerewrites parameter enabled.

The secondary results functionality was added to MediaWiki core
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/324652/> and is extendable so that, in
the future, if we (or someone else!) provide secondary results from other
sources, then this functionality can be used for that. For backwards
compatibility, don't add the srenablerewrites parameter and you'll continue
getting the same results in the same format as before this change.

Happy querying!

Thanks,
Dan

-- 
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation