Topic on Talk:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/Flow

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85770

Issue

As a user I'd like to be presented with suggestions to improve my search.

Background

Currently search depends entirely on a word either matching the search terms, or matching the title of a page. This reduces the usefulness of the search when a word can mean so many things, for example, looking for "trunk", one may mean a proboscis ("elephant's trunk"), boot (a part of a car), a part of a tree, part of a body, and so forth.

Proposed solution

• Extract these from the page with a matching title for wiktionary search results much like the widget Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/self-guided testing#Wiktionary. For example(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trunk)

• Provide a search suggestion: "you may be interested in : proboscis, boot ' using words extracted from the Synonyms sub-heading

Considering the different wiktionaries and different headings or rules in each wiki, this may not be feasible until there is some way to store these in a structured manner.

Even so, just showing the contents under the synonym (and similar ones in other wiktionaries) heading will be a good short term improvement.

There's also :https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Wikisaurus, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikisaurus:greed.

Hi, this is an intruging suggestion, thanks for posting.

However, using 'food' or 'greed' or 'house' as a search term goes directly to the article page on that search query. Are you suggesting to add the 'you maybe interested in ___' phrase with synonym subheading within article pages?

The suggestion was actually to add it either just below the search box in Special:Search .

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>search term goes directly to the article page on that search query

Well, that's because those are single word queries, and also because that's English wikipedia, and they are addicted to creating redirects for everything. In fact, the reason it works is probably because they used a bot to find synonyms and add redirects to make up for the limitations in the search engine.

In smaller wikipedia, uncommon words will always have such problems:

• bugzut (gluton)- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buzgut, enwiki
• paupérrimo (synonym poor) - ptwiki
• méphitique - (foul smelling ) -

In some of the above results wiktionary sister search provides enough context for a person to improve their search. In other cases, it doesn't help.

Seems like a somewhat similar idea has been suggested (although not exactly the same):

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T127874

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85770

The automobile example still doesn't show the expected results, and wiktionary snippets are not that helpful in that case, but its synonyms are (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/car#Synonyms) "private vehicle that moves independently): auto, motorcar, vehicle; automobile (US), motor (British colloquial), carriage (obsolete)".

If the user had been suggested "US automobile", and they used it, they would have likely found the page they were looking for.

Also, it might be worth evaluating the possibility of disabling (for unregistered users) the "automatic go to article".

It can often be very confusing to type something and suddenly be taken to an article, which in some cases may be unrelated, as the user may merely want to have an idea of the existing pages before improving search keywords.

Entering a wrong keyword there can also quickly pull you into a completely unrelated wikimedia project, e.g. Special:Search/meta:monkeys or randomly push you into random wikis (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:GoToInterwiki/wikicities:monkeys).

Not to mention that it may result in a lot of deadends and needlessly skew the search results statistics.

Hi,

I've added this conversation to the older (but similar) ticket you noted earlier: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85770. We'll take a look at this and scope out the work that this type of new update would probably need and then prioritize it from there. :)

This project would likely give the search engine a huge boost: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T986 (although that may take a year or more to complete). Since that will make it possible to differentiate between synonyms and the same word in different dialects, e.g. boot vs trunk, pants vs underwear , and automobile vs motor.

Thanks for considering the idea!