hooray for mobile search improvements! yeah, we're talking about two separate things, both of which could be valuable additions to our mobile site from what we've seen:
* personal/device search history. it would be great to incorporate and give priority to previously searched terms or visited pages. but i'd go one step further and consider an explicit search history/page view history/articles recently visited/ recent searches, especially for smartphones and apps. in more active wikipedia readers, we noticed existing habits doing this - sometimes it was a workaround using a browser or devices bookmarking capabilities and other times it was a feature offered in an app. in both cases, we observed that navigating to these pages through these histories or bookmarks was *much* preferred to retyping. to reiterate what others have already said: typing is costly. on touchsreen devices, taps and scrolls are much cheaper. on non touch screen devices, arrow or scroll downs are sometimes much cheaper (blackberries) and sometimes only minorly cheaper.
* aggregate search history/trending topics. i think this would be most appropriate in a smartphone/app scenario. generally speaking folks want to search, find the article, get an understanding of a topic/find the piece of information or answer they were looking for and move on from there. discovery, browsing, and less directed interactions wikipedia do happen, just far less frequently. which isn't to say that we can't enable it or encourage it - but such offerings should not be included at the cost of fast and easy access to search and navigation to a particular page.
but back to easier search. full screen focus for search is the way to go - for all devices with larger screens!! and minimizing typing for all devices (and all languages!!) as well, and i'm confident we can massage the interaction to accomplish this along with autocomplete and search suggestions. the transportability of this across languages, i am completely uncertain of.....
one thing to add to the mix to consider: people frequently mention needing just an overview or quick understanding of a top in their mobile scenarios. we've discussed first paragraph preview or even a "mobile summary". i can see it implemented here as an option to load (or otherwise view or preview) the first paragraph or go to the full article. thoughts?
ok, one more thing to add to the mix: what of peoples google practices of [searchterm] [wiki] or even just [searchterm], relying on the wikipedia page being on of the top results. we'll have numbers in quantity from our survey, but from our qualitative research, ~1/3 of folks reached the wikipedia mobile site this way, not to mention carrying over from computer practices. wapedia users are prompted when they click on a google search result in the wikipedia namespace to either open the link in a browser or open it in the app....something to consider when we're pondering search.
parul
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Tomasz Finc
<tfinc@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Brandon Harris <
bharris@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Why not "trending topics" - pages that have been seeing lots of traffic
> in recent time?
>
> I'm not sure how easily that would be to code up, though.
suggestions as our cache hit rate shows us that our users are very
similar.