Help:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester

Please let us know what is and is not working well with the new completion suggester. Direct bugs can filed into phabricator, surfaced on our [mailto:discovery@lists.wikimedia.org mailing list], or on irc freednode #wikimedia-discovery

Additional word terminators needed?
When typing in CirrusSearch the completion search only looks for pages in the main namespace and seems blind to other namespaces. Many communities utilise namespaces for a logical categorisation or behavioural difference, and this seems to be an unnecessary limitation. Similarly the suggester seems to be inhibited by a forward slash in a page name, so searching for CompletionSearcher shows nothing in the type ahead unless you have started your search term with Extension:...

Both cases almost seem not to identify the colon or the forward slash as logical word terminators in a nomenclature construct. — billinghurst  sDrewth  12:58, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
 * You're correct that the completion suggester is limited to the main namespace; this was explicitly noted in the announcement and is for purely technical reasons during the initial rollout of the beta feature. Any more full rollout of the beta feature would not have this limitation. The reason the completion suggester can't find this page is due to this very limitation; the page is not in its search index. Otherwise, colons and slashes in page titles seem to work just fine for me, provided that the page is in the main namespace. Can you give me another example of this problem so that I can verify it? Thanks! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 04:19, 22 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I was (typically) searching at enWS for a biographical work set at a subpage, so for this example search there for the word "Bickerton". It shows results for the DNB work, though not The Dictionary of Australasian Biography/Bickerton, Alexander William.  That said, I, subsequently, did a  search for "Australasian" and neither the root page of the work, nor its subpages, show. So how far into pagename does CompletionSuggester look for a match? — billinghurst  sDrewth  04:08, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
 * To note that I did look to find a work with a shorter root pagename, and with something shorter it is able to detect a forward slash. Interesting it is something with partial split searches, eg. "Biography/c" gives some results, though "Biography/Ch" only gives one. Searching for "Legendary" looking for Australian Legendary Tales gives no success, nor the word "Mayamah" looking for Australian Legendary Tales/The Mayamah. Finding it hard to find a short enough book title that may enable looking up subpage names. — billinghurst  sDrewth  06:14, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
 * This new beta feature is still, fundamentally, a completion suggester. It's not intended that it's able to find those pages with the search query you're entering, as the page titles don't begin with the query you entered. Building out something to do that is significantly more complex, which is why we've started with what we've got here. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:37, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Different order
I think it can be a good idea it recognize pages put in different order, like if I'm searching for a name I can write the name in another order. Ps: maybe search in alias in wikidata could be a good idea.--Martinligabue (talk) 15:18, 21 December 2015 (UTC) PPs, can you reply me on it.wiki?

@Whoever yes i think that there should be an algorithim that can still determine search results even if the order of the words are mixed up. Lets say that i am searching about Attack on Titan- it would be really useful for those days when a person cannot remember all of the details of the word and can only remember like "anime, titans" and the algorithim would show Attack on Titan! WHOKNEWABOUTTHAT? (talk) 20:22, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Fundamentally the search as you type serves too many queries to perform very advanced searches, such as answering `anime, titans` or answering with the words out of order. We serve over a hundred million search as you type queries in a day and our servers would melt if we asked them to perform much more than a search against the title itself. We do have an algorithm that does a pretty decent job at answering these queries though, the full text search is designed to specifically answer these queries. Searching for anime, titans on enwiki brings up Attack on Titan as the eighth result on enwiki which seems fairly reasonable. Note that even google only does autocompletion from a prefix (in their case to other searches, rather than titles) for search as you type and not a full on search query. EBernhardson (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

great
nice great article