Hi Pine,

Thanks for reaching out with your questions. I'm hoping that what I've
written below will give you some answers of what we're working on.

*tl;dr - we're working on it ;)*

The Discovery Search team have been quite busy over the last few quarters
working on getting the backend quicker and more accurate in serving up
search results with our updated completion suggester
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester> and
it really does show on our dashboard for zero results
<http://discovery.wmflabs.org/metrics/#failure_rate> returned. However, we
still have lots of work to do, including updating the elasticsearch cluster
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136001> and logstash
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136003>.

We've got a quite a few tickets in Phabricator to investigate how we can do
searches across projects <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137312> and
languages. One such ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138958> is
to detect if the user used the 'wrong' keyboard when typing in their search
on the en/ru Wikipedias using a Russian/American keyboard. We also
have a TextCat
demo <https://tools.wmflabs.org/textcatdemo/> that you might want to check
out and using wikidata aliases and descriptions
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T117483> are also generally being looked
at.

Additionally, on our backlog
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/discovery-search-backlog/> is to
improve 'fuzzy' full text <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T135920>
searches to return more meaningful results. Because the autocomplete and
full text algorithms are very different, this can cause odd results in some
cases. One option we'll can take a look at is if the full text algorithm
doesn't return any results, run that same search through the completion
suggester. It would take additional time on the backend of course, to run
this additional search with the added difficulty in that the completion
suggester doesn't run the elasticsearch highlighter.

We also are looking at how to handle question marks (?) in a search query
and to design a page that would display search results, across languages,
in a meaningful manner to our user, that might be able to show redirects
better as well.

Whew...lots going on, so stay tuned!

Cheers,

Deb


--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation

On Mon, Jul 4, 2016 at 9:35 AM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Discovery,
>
> Following up on conversation from last week's Metrics Meeting:
>
> * If user 1 enters search term X in language A on a.wikipedia.org and
> there are no article or redirect title results on that wiki for X, can we
> show them search results for X automatically translated into other
> languages on wikis where an article or redirect does exist for the
> translated term?
>
> * If user 2 enters search term Y in language b on c.wikipedia.org and
> there are no article or redirect title results on that wiki for Y, can we
> show them search results for Y on b.wikipedia.org?
>
> * What is the status of integrating Wiktionary search results into
> Wikipedia search results?
>
> * Have there been any initiatives to integrate Wikivoyage, Wikispecies,
> Wikisource, Commons, and other project search results into Wikipedia search
> results, including with options for multilingual search as mentioned above?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Pine
>
> _______________________________________________
> discovery mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
>
>
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