While doing CR for
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/232896/3/modules/ext.wikimediaEvents.sea…
I came to have serious doubts about this approach.
In brief, it attempts to track user satisfaction with search results by
measuring how long do people stay on pages. It does that by appending
fromsearch=1 to links for 0.5% of users. However, this results in page
views being uncached and thus increasing HTML load time by a factor of 4-5
and, consequentially, kicking even short pages' first paint outside of
comfort zone of 1 second - and that's measured from the office, with ping
of 2-3 ms to ulsfo. My concern here is that as a result we're trying to
measure the very metric we're screwing with, resulting in experiment being
inaccurate.
Can we come up with a way of measurement that's less intrusive or alter the
requirements of the experiment?
--
Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])