Search Platform/Documentation
Docs and Other Links
Main Documentation
Search
- Why Search is Important—Why does the Search Platform team even exist?
- https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Search/Technical_interactions: how to build features on top of Search
- mw:Help:CirrusSearch—Information on how the Wikimedia search works.
- Completion Suggester—incremental search
- Search Glossary—a place for definitions, context, and links for terms we use that other people may not be familiar with
- Testing Search—testing search changes is complicated!
- Elasticsearch stats on Grafana
- Logstash for Elasticsearch/Cirrus (requires login)
- Data access and analysis guidelines used by the Search Platform team around data sources, or by other teams around Search Platform data sources, are documented on Meta
- BrowserBot—a browser test bot for search
- Top Unsuccessful Search Queries—The difficulties in creating a list of unsuccessful search results
- mw:Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements
- mw:TextCat—a software component used for doing language detection
- How to integrate with search through Weighted Tags
Misc
Blog posts
- Language, Harmony, and Unpacking—A Year in the Life of a Search Nerd (April 2023)
- Permuting Khmer: Restructuring Khmer syllables for search (June 2020)
- Computational knowledge: Wikidata, Wikidata Query Service, and women who are mayors! (March 2020)
- The Anatomy of Search: a series on how full-text search engines work (2018–2019)
- A token of my affection (August 2018)
- Variation under nature (September 2018)
- The root of the problem (November 2018)
- A place for my stuff (March 2019)
- In search of… (September 2019)
- Hello, my name is ________: Searching for names is not always straightforward (May 2018)
- Confound it!—Supporting languages with multiple writing systems (March 2018)
- Bare-Bones Basics of Full-Text Search [video] (January 2018)
- Gnomes and trolls and hobgoblins (oh my!)—Failed queries and the vicarious fear of missing out (December 2017)
- So -happy to meet you: Advanced searching techniques on Wikimedia sites (November 2017)
- How we collaborated to build a new open source plugin to improve search results across language-wikis (October 2017)
- Admittedly loopy but not entirely absurd—Understanding our Search Relevance Survey (September 2017)
- Wikipedia, search, and the “цкщтп” keyboard (August 2017)
- Stripping question marks from Wikimedia searches (August 2016)
- Wikipedia seeks to speak your language (July 2016)
- Wikipedia Search Isn’t Necessarily Third BESt (September 2015)
SLOs
Dashboards
Superset
- Search user engagement
- Search user engagement - geolocations
- Search user engagement - Emerging Languages
- Search Metrics
- Fulltext Head Queries
Historical documentation
The Search Platform team was formerly part of the Discovery Department in Audiences; but, as part of the re-organization (tune-up) of June 2017, the Search Platform team is now part of Technology. Pages of historical note:
- Discovery Department (April 2015–December 2017)
- Search (prior to April 2015)
Wikidata Query Service (WDQS)
The Wikidata Platform team now owns WDQS, but we are keeping these useful links here until they can find a new home in the new team's pages.