[Search-l] Input wanted on Mini and main name spaces for Search Wikia

[Peter Burden]

On 03/02/2008, Tom Wright <tat.wright at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Certainly it's a good idea to add features for ranking results.
>
> I feel that an argument why the absense of links in mini-articles
> articles is better than their presense needs to be clearly enunciated
> before one removes their possible benefits.
>
> Is your argument that presenting links in mini-articles will detract
> from their other purposes of disambiguation - hence the possible roles
> of mini-articles should be restricted to only providing
> disambiguation? This may well be a reasonable argument.
>
> What is it that is  wrong with having links presented in both
> mini-articles and the main search results? Plausible arguments might
> include:
> (i) Irritation of having to look in two places for links.

(ii) Damaging duplication of effort between modifying search results
> and creating mini-article links.

(iii) Causes links to be created rather than disambiguation.
> (iv) Providing a disambiguation to a suitable term will almost always
> provide a suitable link as the first result - requiring just one more
> click. Hence you can have "links without external links"
> (v) Risks of spam.
> (vi) Giving an individual user the power to place a link at the top of
> search results is excessive iand likely to cause conflict.
> (vii) The space of search terms is far too large to police.
>
> But as to whether these apply, I am not sure.


Most of these seem plausible.  The final 3 (v) - (vii) are by far the
most  significant. A mini-article with links would look, to many
people, rather like the sponsored results that appear at the top
of Google result lists and people would tend to interpret them the
same way. The risks of mis-use by financially motivated members
of the community are substantial and are probably best avoided.

A link in a mini-article could easily be an excuse for not providing
useful information. It is much quicker to read one sentence of
informative text than to click on a link and wait for some media
intensive irrelevancy to download.

As a sole exception, I'd like to see mini-articles including a link
to the relevant Wikipedia article. Brand-wise this should be
acceptable.

Another point I haven't really seen discussed is the relationship
between mini-articles and search queries. For example if I do
a search for "York" then I am NOT interested in mini-articles
and pages about "New York". To resolve this problem with
mini-articles I'd suggest that there should be an EXACT match
between mini-article titles and queries.

Incidentally the York search on Search Wikia does, indeed,
give lots of pages about New York, whereas Google gets it
right. Not quite sure how Google does this - conceivably it
looks at my IP address and decides (correctly) that I'm in the
UK and delivers results accordingly. The Search Wikia team
need to think about this.

These comments have been about mini-articles as information
rather than disambiguation. To provide a good user experience
disambiguation should provide an immediate hook to enable
the user to repeat the query focussing just on pages that match
the selected disambiguation. To make this work requires
semantic tagging of both pages and queries. I think this is
doable and would make Search Wikia stand out. I'll post some
notes on how I think this would work soon.


I don't see why other mechanisms are any more scalable than
> mini-articles - though they might be fundamentally better.
>
> Sorry, I'm not trying to be argumentative, though it might seem like
> I'm doing a good impression...


It's a discussion not an argument  ;-)
Your ideas help me refine and expand my ideas, and hope help
you and anybody else reading this in the sames way.

As an example of when the links provided with extra information and
> grouping can be useful look at
> http://re.search.wikia.com/search#britney%20spears versus the search
> results for britney spears on google - mentally try to create an order
> of links that will provide the same amount of information. (Sorry,
> couldn't find a more cultured example.)
>
> Tom
>
>
>
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