Am 17.02.2017 um 22:02 schrieb James Heald:
Quick question on this Stas:
- Why do the suggestions that come up when typing in the search box seem so much
more on-point (ie better at presenting the most likely option first) than the ones that come up in the results list?
The reason is that the "search box" on wikidata.org is fake: it is not the search box you see on wikipedia, it does not use the search infrastructure that Special:Search uses (Cirrus). It uses a custom API module (wbsearchentities) which relies on a custom database table (wb_terms). We need this because Cirrus did not have suppor for structured data or multilingual fields. That is changing now, and we want to use Cirrus for everything. But until then, wikidata is using two completely different search mechanisms, both of which work well for some things, and really badly for others.