Wikimedia Discovery/Search


 * See Help:Searching for a basic user guide, Help:CirrusSearch for an FAQ and a list of key features of the software component.

This page describes the Wikimedia Foundation's Discovery department activities surrounding our sites' search functionality. Our current project is to improve our Elasticsearch search system (using an extension called CirrusSearch).

Current work

 * See Discovery's current quarter goals

Wikimedia search has an incremental search completion suggester that is in active development. The team has improved this feature with better handling of typos and better ranking of possible matches in the suggested articles. Work continues to add real-time index updates to the completion suggester and improve overall stability and performance of search by upgrading to the latest version of Elasticsearch.

This feature was available from December 2015 to March 2016 as a beta feature.

Rationale
The Wikimedia search is an important component to the discovery of knowlege within our projects....

Goals for our current quarter:
 * Enhance search results and expose users to other interesting content by improving interwiki search integration.
 * Adding real-time index updates to completion suggester and improve overall stability and performance of search by upgrading to Elasticsearch 2.x.

Search metrics
Key performance indicators of how search is working can be found on the search metrics dashboard at http://discovery.wmflabs.org/metrics/

Documents

 * TextCat—a software component used for doing language detection
 * How Elasticsearch breaks Part 1 Part 2
 * Notes on unbreaking and optimizing elasticsearch
 * Testing Search—testing search changes is complicated!