On 19 February 2016 at 17:13, Jon Katz <jk...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Erik!  This is very helpful.  What do you mean by 'back testing'?
>

For search, there's a few different approaches for quantitative testing
that are less difficult than A/B testing in terms of development overhead,
data analysis and coordination. One of those is to replay real user queries
against the index, but run the query with slightly different parameters
from original. This is super cheap compared to an A/B test, but the
downside is that it can only answer really deterministic (for lack of a
better word) things, like how the parameters affect the zero-results rate
or result ordering; since there's no user interaction with the replayed
queries, you don't know what the clickthrough would've been, so it's hard
to measure how satisfied the user would've been.

Hopefully that helps explain it.

Thanks,
Dan

-- 
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
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