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

[Peter Burden]

On 03/02/2008, Balinny <balinny at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Peter Burden wrote:
>
> >
> > 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").


If the Wikipedia article appeared at (or near) the top of the regular search
results, people could be excused for imagining that the ranking had been
tweaked in some way to make this happen. This would not be good for
credibility, however if the Wikipedia link appeared in the mini-article that

would look like an acceptable endorsement of another of our branded
products.

> 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.


Seems sensible

> 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.



Sounds like the way, I think, they handle queries like "The Times" and
"Vitamin A", something Search Wikia needs to work on.

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