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(a)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:
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
--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation