We've had a lot of ideas floating around over the past week or two about
what to do in the final weeks of the quarter towards tackling the zero
results rate problem. This morning the engineering team had a 25 minute
meeting to coalesce these ideas into a plan and sync up. We took notes in
this etherpad:
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/nextupforsearch
The short summary of the meeting was a test which tries relaxing the AND
operator for common terms in queries would be tried. This should improve
natural language queries by reducing how important words like "the",
"a",
etc. are to the query, thus focussing in on the essence of the query. This
also means that pages that don't contain these common terms, but only
contain the core terms, could now be returned in results.
This work is tracked in the following series of tasks, the structure of
which should now be very familiar to you all:
- T112178 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112178>: Relax 'AND'
operator with the common term query
- T112581 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112581>: Run A/B test on
relaxing AND operator for search (test starting on 2015-09-22)
- T112582 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112582>: Validate data for
AND operator A/B test (on or after 2015-09-23)
- T112583 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112583>: Analyse results
of AND operator A/B test (on or after 2015-09-29)
What this does mean is that we've probably got a bunch of tests lined up to
start at the same time. In principle this isn't a problem, but if the tests
overlap it can cause difficulties. This will be discussed in tomorrow's
analysis meeting.
As always, if there are any questions, let me know!
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation