[Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

Gutza gutza at moongate.ro
Tue Jan 13 13:33:54 UTC 2004


How about logging the failed "Go" queries on the server and ranking 
them? Searching the Wikipedia can be pretty frustrating at times, 
especially when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. You know 
what I mean, you *know* what you're looking for, you just don't know 
what exactly it is called, especially when that's an article which can 
have a lot of names.

Once the queries are logged and ranked, a relatively simple mechanism 
could be built to pick one of the top 100 every couple of hours and show 
it somewhere in every page, obviously as long as the article hasn't been 
already created. That way we increase the chances towards meaningful 
pathfinding (#REDIRECTs) and *really* "wanted articles".

I'm aware this would incur a tad more load on the server, but since 
people typically tend to follow links rather than search for stuff, I 
don't think this would be a serious performance hit. What do you think?

--Gutza






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