Hello!
The Search Team in the Discovery Department is implementing a maximum search query length https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947. There are two main reasons to do this:
1. Extremely long queries are almost always gibberish from things like malfunctioning scrapers. These queries skew our statistics about the usefulness of our search. Implementing a limit will reduce the magnitude of skew. 2. Extremely long queries have a disproportionate impact on performance. On its own this isn't enough, but considering point 1 above, limiting them is unlikely to impact any actual users. Implementing a limit will improve performance.
We've chosen a hard limit of 300 characters. If your query exceeds this, you will be told that your query exceeds the maximum length. Based on our analysis of typical query lengths https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947#1515387, this change should impact almost nobody. If you think you'll be adversely affected, please reach out to us and we'll work with you to figure something out.
Thanks!
Dan
The patch implementing this functionality https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/230646/ was just merged. We therefore expect that this will therefore go out to production next week with the normal MediaWiki deployment train.
Dan
On 10 August 2015 at 14:36, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello!
The Search Team in the Discovery Department is implementing a maximum search query length https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947. There are two main reasons to do this:
- Extremely long queries are almost always gibberish from things like
malfunctioning scrapers. These queries skew our statistics about the usefulness of our search. Implementing a limit will reduce the magnitude of skew. 2. Extremely long queries have a disproportionate impact on performance. On its own this isn't enough, but considering point 1 above, limiting them is unlikely to impact any actual users. Implementing a limit will improve performance.
We've chosen a hard limit of 300 characters. If your query exceeds this, you will be told that your query exceeds the maximum length. Based on our analysis of typical query lengths https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947#1515387, this change should impact almost nobody. If you think you'll be adversely affected, please reach out to us and we'll work with you to figure something out.
Thanks!
Dan
-- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation
A follow-up patch https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/231437/ which increases the limit to 2,500 was merged; this means the character limit will be 2,500 characters instead of 300 characters when it goes into production next week. I expect that this limit will be reset back to 300 within a few weeks. Please see the associated Phabricator task https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947 for more information.
Dan
On 11 August 2015 at 12:54, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
The patch implementing this functionality https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/230646/ was just merged. We therefore expect that this will therefore go out to production next week with the normal MediaWiki deployment train.
Dan
On 10 August 2015 at 14:36, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello!
The Search Team in the Discovery Department is implementing a maximum search query length https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947. There are two main reasons to do this:
- Extremely long queries are almost always gibberish from things
like malfunctioning scrapers. These queries skew our statistics about the usefulness of our search. Implementing a limit will reduce the magnitude of skew. 2. Extremely long queries have a disproportionate impact on performance. On its own this isn't enough, but considering point 1 above, limiting them is unlikely to impact any actual users. Implementing a limit will improve performance.
We've chosen a hard limit of 300 characters. If your query exceeds this, you will be told that your query exceeds the maximum length. Based on our analysis of typical query lengths https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T107947#1515387, this change should impact almost nobody. If you think you'll be adversely affected, please reach out to us and we'll work with you to figure something out.
Thanks!
Dan
-- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation
-- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation
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