Discovery/Status updates/2016-04-25

This is the weekly update for the week starting 2016-04-25

=Discussions= =Events and News =
 * Discussions David, Erik, and Trey had a discussion with JustinO about improving recall and improving search in general. Semi-readable notes are in an etherpad. Additional thoughts and comments are welcome.
 * Deb and Moiz had discussions with Abbey, Daisy and Edward about upcoming surveys planned for the Wikipedia portal; awaiting Legal approval.
 * Events and News The updated Perl version of TextCat is now available on GitHub. Reminder: the PHP version has been available for a while.
 * Analysis has been completed on low-performing queries (< 3 results) on French, Spanish, and Italian Wikipedias, to optimize performance on language identification with TextCat on those wikis. German is coming up next.
 * Analysis is complete on recent Wikipedia.org portal page A/B test: Wikipedia Portal Test of Language Detection and Primary Link Resorting
 * Maps servers now have 16 varnish servers instead of 2 in 4 different data centers instead of 1.

= Other Noteworthy Stuff = = Did you know? = Did you know?  = Development =  Development
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff A new Wikipedia portal A/B test will be released next week - it will add in descriptive text to the sister project links at the bottom of the page.
 * Search for a new analyst (Oliver's replacement) is going along well. We got 169 applicants and some of them have done or are scheduled to do the take-home analysis task.


 * View all open tickets related to Discovery.