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 activities surrounding our sites' search functionality. Our current project is to improve our Elasticsearch search system (using an extension called CirrusSearch).

Current Work
Search has a BetaFeature for improving the incremental search completion suggester. This feature has been available since December 2015 and will eventually replace the default behavior for incremental search. Currently the completion suggester is very literal - mistype a word and you won't see any suggestions. This update will make the search better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes. The list of suggestions also tends to be more accurate and relevant to the original search query.

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

Goals for our current quarter:
 * Improve relevance of intra-wiki search results (see a small demo comparing the new suggester to the current)
 * Generate a model for user satisfaction with search results based on qualitatively-validated quantitative data.

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!

Links

 * Phabricator workboard showing current work of the team.
 * Help:CirrusSearch - Information on how the Wikimedia search works.