Robert Stojnic wrote: > On 19/06/11 00:58, [email protected] wrote: >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Aomiz+Sucharat >> says >> Did you mean: Aomiz Suchart >> so we click it, and then we are asked >> Did you mean: Aziz Suharto >> >> Having been used to Google, one feels a little like "goose chase". > > It would be good if we could for each suggestion first run the query and > see if it yields any results that wouldn't trigger the suggestion engine > again (because it not only depends on the query, but also on the quality > of the results, i.e. Did you mean... is always performed *after* the > search). Unfortunately, we currently don't have the resources to do so, > thus we use heuristics which mostly work, but not always.. > > As for comparison with Google, they are a multi-billion company > specializing in search, while our Did you mean.. algorithm was > essentially invented and coded in my spare time.
Yeah, this is a rather nasty usability problem. I briefly looked for bugs filed about this, but didn't see any off-hand. The main issue (to me) is that it says "Did you mean: [bold blue link]", which in this context I think most users would expect to be able to click and go directly to the article. It should be simple enough to query the page table for page existence, but perhaps two messages would be better here. ---- Your search for "Barack Obamaa" returned no results. Did you mean: [[Barack Obama]]? Search instead for [[Special:Search/Barack Obama]]? ---- I'm not sure if that would help matters or just clutter the page. This issue should definitely be addressed at some point, though. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
