Hello,
*Apologies in advance for the cross-post!*
The Discovery Search Team would like to open the conversation about some
future improvements to search that we’re considering. We’ve been thinking
about how to display additional results that might be interesting and
helpful to our users, and we’d like to get feedback on these plans.
Currently, we’re busy with our quarterly goals
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2016-17_Q3_Goals> of
upgrading to ElasticSearch 5 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T154501>,
setting up A/B tests for sister project search results
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T145917>, and researching new language
analyzers. [1] [2] [3] This means that the new work discussed here won’t be
started for a few months, leaving lots of time to give input. :-)
Over the last year, we’ve worked hard to reduce the zero results rate
(which measures how many queries get zero results returned) so that even
really obscure queries can get useful results. To that end, we have made a
number of enhancements to the search system: stripping question marks
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133711> (replacing with spaces)
and language
detection <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149316> (cross language
searching). [4] [5]
What we’d like to do now is to provide additional results: helpful
suggestions and links to articles - or additional search results pages - to
aid in finding information that users are looking for. These additional
results will most likely be placed near the bottom of the page, at the end
of the list of original results returned. We’ll also make these additional
results available to the search API.
In gathering these additional results, we will use several techniques that
have been researched but not yet put into production; some of these methods
include
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/So_Many_Search_Options>
wrong keyboard layout, quote stripping, and sister wiki searching
(cross-project). [6]
We would love to have your comments and/or suggestions posted on the talk
page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Discovery/So_Many_Search_Options>
of the ‘So Many Search Options
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/So_Many_Search_Options>’
page or on the Phabricator task <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T156019>.
[7] [8] [9]
Cheers,
The Discovery Search Team
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2016-17_Q3_Goals
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T154501
[3]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T145917
[4]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133711
[5]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149316
[6]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/So_
Many_Search_Options
[7]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Discovery/
So_Many_Search_Options
[8]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/So_
Many_Search_Options
[9]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T156019
--
deb tankersley
irc: debt
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation