[Wikipedia-l] Logging no-Go queries?

[Magnus Manske]

Gutza wrote:
> 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?

A little extra table with a string and a counter (to count multiple 
ones), and maybe a timestamp, so we can automatically get rid of queries 
that were searched only once for in, say, a month. Or a week.

You probably don't mean to display /all top 100 queries/ somewhere on 
every page? ;-)
IMHO a link to "Special:Most searched topics" would suffice...

As much as I like adding new toys (Phase II was practically drowning in 
'em ;-) I'd suggest to put that aside until we have a monster server 
running the database again. Otherwise, I like it (had something similar, 
but more simple implemented once).

Magnus