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=Sp…
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Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation