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_Optio... [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