User:Privatemusings/MailingListPost

date	Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 2:29 PM

I thought it might be an opportune moment to offer some feedback about out internal search, because I think there are a few pretty easy changes which could help a lot - and also I wanted to offer thanks to wherever it's due, because it's certainly vastly improved since I first played around with it, and found it quite useless!

I tried a variety of searches, but the general points apply to this, my latest, one; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=cambridge+UK&go=Go

First up I'd like to suggest some re-wording / re-flowing of the information above the text box - if someone could point me in the right direction for such suggestions it'd be appreciated! (mainly just small things like establishing whether or not "No article title matches" and "No page with that title exists." represent redundant information - and just generally making a bit more sense to readers!

I'd also suggest that the search term text box be at the top of the page.

I'd further like to ask if there's any way that the text information included in the search results could be reliably culled to be the introductory text only (perhaps ignoring everything within {{ would be a good start? - if that doesn't break something.....).

I think the size of the article is self explanatory, but would suggest a "Date last modified :" explanation for that bit.

Finally, the results page has some interesting choices with the first 20 results, especially when compared to the index. This one; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri seemed particularly esoteric, especially when compared to something like; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire which doesn't appear until ~ 200 (although it is mentioned in the 4th result... I wonder if there would be any way of having our search function treat disambig. pages a bit differently, and providing the links within them directly to the search results page? - a bit like the Google style in the first result here; http://www.google.com.au/search?q=wikimedia+foundation

that's enough to begin with! - I'm actually really heartened by the improvements that seem to have been made on this, and hope that a few more little ones might push it over the hump into something genuinely handy!

cheers,

PM.