Though it isn't exactly the same, this reminds me of our discussion back in
Aug/Sep about Corn and Maize, much of which is on Phabricator:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110571 .

The behavior you want happens sometimes. Searching for "usually" gives as
the first result: Convention (norm) (redirect from Usually)

"difficult": Difficulty (redirect from Difficult)

"corn", among its many odd behaviors, gives: Maize (redirect from Maize
corn).

I think there's some sort of ranking going on for redirects that can put a
partial match above an exact match (hence "Maize corn" instead of "corn" as
the redirect shown).

More relevant to your example, I think that if there's a match on one or
more search terms in the redirected-to title, it blocks redirected-from
titles from being shown. Searching for "neropathic" gets a spelling
correction to "neuropathic", which gives as the first result: Peripheral
neuropathy (redirect from Neuropathic).

David may know more about either of these cases off the top of his head.
(But maybe not, since it was a while ago, and I recall that it was very
messy, and we declined to work on it then.)

So, at the very least, the control group would at least sometimes have a
chance of getting the test behavior because we do that now under certain
circumstances.

Another option is to consider this a bug fix so that we have consistent
behavior whenever there's an exact match of the query to a redirect title,
regardless of partial matches to the redirected-to title or higher-ranked
redirects.

It would also be interesting to know how often queries get redirected
results, and how often they show the redirects—either in general, or as
part of any A/B test.

—Trey

Trey Jones
Software Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 3:40 AM, Oliver Keyes <[email protected]> wrote:

> So I was looking up information on peripheral neuritis[0] and I
> accidentally mistyped it as "peripheral neuriti". The good news: the
> autocorrector worked out I'd done it wrong, corrected it, and sent me
> automatically to the right results. Yay![1]
>
> But looking at the results I see a really obvious improvement we could
> make that would definitely improve the user experience in this
> scenario. See, if you look at the first article on the list you'll see
> it's "Peripheral neuropathy". Why? Because peripheral neuritis
> redirects to that. But the article header appears in the search
> results as "Peripheral neuropathy", since that's the real title.
>
> But it's not what I searched for. What I searched for was neuritis. Is
> neuritis the same as neuropathy? I dunno, I'm a random reader. Is this
> a good search result to click on? No idea.
>
> What I'd love for us to do is run an A/B test with two conditions:
>
> 1. Users who search for a term which redirects to an article get the
> current experience (control)
> 2. Users who search for a term which redirects to an article get the
> article title in the search results claiming to be the redirect title
> (test)
>
> I bet this would really improve the clickthrough rate for this class
> of searches. It would definitely improve the UX.
>
> [0] I'm researching thalidomide. Long story.
> [1]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=peripheral+neuriti&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
> --
> Oliver Keyes
> Count Logula
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> _______________________________________________
> discovery mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
>
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