A few of us from Discovery (myself, Tomasz Finc, Erik Bernhardson, and some others too) had the opportunity to meet Sylvain recently when he was in San Francisco. We chatted about touch points between Discovery and Common Search. One important thing I personally learnt from chatting to Sylvain is that the challenges are *very* different for building an in-site search (like Discovery) and building a web search (like Common Search). Data that's critically important for one may be close to irrelevant for the other. Scaling issues for one may not even exist for the other. We did identify a few areas where Common Search may be creating datasets that would be useful for us in Discovery; Sylvain said he'd be in touch with us if that happens. We're going to keep in touch and see if we can help each other out in the future. Thanks, Dan On 18 March 2016 at 22:15, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation

On 28 March 2016 at 17:48, Andreas Kolbe &lt;jayen466(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Potentially. However, it's a vague idea, and we've got a long way to go before this could be seriously considered, so we're not actively working on it. Right now we have a lot of information even within Wikimedia sites which is surfaced poorly; surfacing such information is an important part of Discovery's narrative for FY2016-17 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/FDC_Proposal> (July 2016 - June 2017). I intend for Discovery to work on improving that problem first. https://askplatyp.us/ does a pretty good job of this already, and it's backed by Wikidata. If you want to learn more, you can read the blog post on wikimedia.de <https://blog.wikimedia.de/2015/02/23/platypus-a-speaking-interface-for-wikidata/> and check out the website of the creators <https://projetpp.github.io/>. In the long term, I could see something like this being incorporated into search on our sites if it's good enough. Like the above, it's also a long way off, and we're not actively working on these efforts. Clearly yes, because we're actively building a search engine for Wikipedia and our work is open source. If you actually mean "a general purpose web search engine", then this question is already in the FAQ <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/FAQ#Are_you_building_a_search_engine_to_compete_with_Google.3F> which you referenced, and the answer is no. I presently don't see how Discovery could offer something worthwhile to users here, especially with projects like Common Search already working on the problem. Yes, if users are interested. This is an incredibly early idea that is not fully fleshed out; we don't know how we would achieve something like this right now. A naïve example of how we could do something like this is by boosting the score of certain search results based on the presence of templates on the page. The reality would likely be something significantly more complex than this. So, in short, many things are potentially on the table, but they're early ideas which are not actively being explored, and in exploring them we may decide not to do them. Sorry if that's not definitive enough of a statement, but roadmaps are intentionally not set in stone so as to be flexible and iterative. Dan -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation