The Discovery department's [1] work to improve search continues with a new
tool! We are asking volunteers to help choose, or discern, which search
results are the most relevant.
One way of improving search results relevance is to provide search results
from multiple search engines side-by-side for comparison. Participants pick
the best, most relevant results, which are then used to tune our own search
results. It's one way to help improve search with human assistance, by
showing articles that are most relevant to search queries. This system is
used by many R&D departments and gives great results.
Discernatron is a tool developed by the Discovery department for just this
sort of work. Visitors are asked to pick the most relevant results across
four different search result sets. The data is then used to help improve
our relevancy model for search. Screenshot at [2]
If you are interested in helping, you can access Discernatron at
https://discernatron.wmflabs.org/ and authenticate with your unified user
account.
To learn more about the tool visit
Mediawiki.org. [3]
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discernatron_screenshot.png
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discernatron
--
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison - Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation