[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Brion Vibber]

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Brian wrote:
[snip]
| I may be off base here, but I am under the impression that we don't
| implement basic usability improvements in our search engine, such as
showing
| snippets and researched back link analysis (as simple as PageRank),
because
| we can't afford it.

You're off base. :)

The Lucene-based backend has been undergoing a lot of improvements over
the last year, including making progressive updating actually function
again, and lots of ongoing work on improving ranking with backlinks,
similarity searches, etc. Robert Stojnic is doing this work largely
"invisibly" -- it doesn't change the look and feel of the search engine;
he's just made it work progressively better as the months go by.


The search UI front-end hasn't received a lot of attention in a couple
of years simply because there are lots of other things that have
required developer time, and nobody's had the interest to hop in and
take it over the way Robert took over the backend.

Since it is overdue, I've recently started making some improvements to
the front-end, folding things back into MediaWiki's core search UI
(which will benefit both us and third-party MediaWiki users) and adding
niceties such as thumbnails to image results; please hop over to
wikitech-l if interested in helping out.


As for snippets -- we have included snippets with search results for
many, many years. At the moment though, on most of our sites, snippets
are disabled if you're not logged in.

This was a temporary hack put in because of a performance issue a couple
years ago when we were much more strapped; in the course of other UI
work currently ongoing, that restriction is very likely to be lifted,
and any remaining performance problems worked out. (These weren't
problems with the search engine, but simply the additional strain from
loading extra page text in order to do the snippet extraction. It's very
likely that this problem is simply obsolete due to intermediate growth
and internal caching improvements.)

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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