Agreed on the logging, and on the options. I don't think I'd call it a
bug fix quuuite yet because it's a not-insignificant change, in terms
of effect, for users. I'd much rather test it than have to wildly
hypothesise if our numbers change.

On 30 November 2015 at 09:50, Trey Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
> Though it isn't exactly the same, this reminds me of our discussion back in
> Aug/Sep about Corn and Maize, much of which is on Phabricator:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110571 .
>
> The behavior you want happens sometimes. Searching for "usually" gives as
> the first result: Convention (norm) (redirect from Usually)
>
> "difficult": Difficulty (redirect from Difficult)
>
> "corn", among its many odd behaviors, gives: Maize (redirect from Maize
> corn).
>
> I think there's some sort of ranking going on for redirects that can put a
> partial match above an exact match (hence "Maize corn" instead of "corn" as
> the redirect shown).
>
> More relevant to your example, I think that if there's a match on one or
> more search terms in the redirected-to title, it blocks redirected-from
> titles from being shown. Searching for "neropathic" gets a spelling
> correction to "neuropathic", which gives as the first result: Peripheral
> neuropathy (redirect from Neuropathic).
>
> David may know more about either of these cases off the top of his head.
> (But maybe not, since it was a while ago, and I recall that it was very
> messy, and we declined to work on it then.)
>
> So, at the very least, the control group would at least sometimes have a
> chance of getting the test behavior because we do that now under certain
> circumstances.
>
> Another option is to consider this a bug fix so that we have consistent
> behavior whenever there's an exact match of the query to a redirect title,
> regardless of partial matches to the redirected-to title or higher-ranked
> redirects.
>
> It would also be interesting to know how often queries get redirected
> results, and how often they show the redirects—either in general, or as part
> of any A/B test.
>
> —Trey
>
> Trey Jones
> Software Engineer, Discovery
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 3:40 AM, Oliver Keyes <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> So I was looking up information on peripheral neuritis[0] and I
>> accidentally mistyped it as "peripheral neuriti". The good news: the
>> autocorrector worked out I'd done it wrong, corrected it, and sent me
>> automatically to the right results. Yay![1]
>>
>> But looking at the results I see a really obvious improvement we could
>> make that would definitely improve the user experience in this
>> scenario. See, if you look at the first article on the list you'll see
>> it's "Peripheral neuropathy". Why? Because peripheral neuritis
>> redirects to that. But the article header appears in the search
>> results as "Peripheral neuropathy", since that's the real title.
>>
>> But it's not what I searched for. What I searched for was neuritis. Is
>> neuritis the same as neuropathy? I dunno, I'm a random reader. Is this
>> a good search result to click on? No idea.
>>
>> What I'd love for us to do is run an A/B test with two conditions:
>>
>> 1. Users who search for a term which redirects to an article get the
>> current experience (control)
>> 2. Users who search for a term which redirects to an article get the
>> article title in the search results claiming to be the redirect title
>> (test)
>>
>> I bet this would really improve the clickthrough rate for this class
>> of searches. It would definitely improve the UX.
>>
>> [0] I'm researching thalidomide. Long story.
>> [1]
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=peripheral+neuriti&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
>> --
>> Oliver Keyes
>> Count Logula
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> discovery mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery
>
>
>
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-- 
Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation

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