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

[Balinny]

Peter Burden wrote:
> 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.
Agree.
> 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.
In that  case wikipedia result should be automatically placed on top,
like Google does (not necessary on the top, only "biased to appear
before most results").
> 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.
It's currently an exact matching. The problem is see is that it's too exact.
Even in capitalization! That needs to be relaxed. And probably also for
multiword searchs. Something like lowercase and alphabetically sort
terms before checking the miniarticle existance.

> 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.
I doubt it's done like that. It's probably detecting "New York" as a
word instead of two terms, or something similar. Google stressed
from the beginning the importance of words placed near the term.