Hello,
I wanted to ask you if this community would be interested in helping us improve search suggestions by participating in a little experiment? As part of our constant effort to improve this facet of our search functionality, we want to try out some alternate methods. If you agree, we will try out these changes here and measure the results.
The testing period will last between two to four weeks.
During that period you will see the following improvements: much faster search suggestions and a different look for the way they appear.
The possible drawbacks are: search suggest will only provide namespace suggestions (no images or categories), and any new articles created during the test will not automatically appear in search suggest (although we can manually add them if that will help). --semanticdrifter (help forum | blog) 15:12, October 2, 2013 (UTC)
- Overall, I have no major issues with this, as search suggest should not be presenting images, categories, user space, etc anyhow. My only concern is your comment about new articles not being included in the suggestions. As you may or may not be aware, we are averaging 5-10 new articles a day at the moment (especially since Star Trek Into Darkness is now available on HD home video), and every new Blu-ray release brings a significant number of new articles along with it due to the higher resolution on screen. -- sulfur (talk) 15:59, October 2, 2013 (UTC)
We can definitely manually update the index every so often to include the newer pages. With that in mind, unless there any objections I will add this community to the test group. I will be in touch as the test approaches with further details. --semanticdrifter (help forum | blog) 16:09, October 4, 2013 (UTC)
- Maybe I wasn't clear before, but I am objecting to this. File and Category are namespaces that shouldn't be unsearchable for a month. I doubt I'm the only one that searches for things in those namespaces, and assuming that is true I have to ask what other namespaces aren't considered a namespace in this? - Archduk3 23:08, October 4, 2013 (UTC)
- The File and Category namespaces would still be searchable, they just wouldn't show up as suggestions for the duration of the test. So the results would surface, they just would not pop up as you type in the search bar. For purposes of this experiment, only the main namespace would appear in the search suggestions. Does that make it any more palatable? We'de really like to include Memory Alpha in this test. --semanticdrifter (help forum | blog) 20:11, October 15, 2013 (UTC)