Dan Garry wrote: >In line with that, one of our primary responsibilities is to ensure that >our search APIs are stable, fast, and easy to use. We'd love to hear from >the people that are using our APIs, so we can learn what you love about >them, what frustrates you, and what we can do to improve them for you.
I have two recurring thoughts about search lately, since you asked. First, multimedia search is absolutely horrible, basically non-existent. If you go to Wikimedia Commons and try its search functionality and then compare to any other media service on the Internet, you can quickly come up with a list of a dozen features that are missing (search by file size, by color, by image file format, etc.). Second, Wikimedia still hasn't aggregated and released anonymized search data. People use Special:Search daily and they encounter a page of search results instead of having a redirect take them to the appropriate destination. Or sometimes worse there's no coverage at all of what our users are searching for. It's a long tail, yes, but we could start filling in gaps if we had data about what users are looking for. We could save users a lot of time and build better sites by analyzing what users are looking for and not finding or what they're looking for and not immediately being redirected toward. And yes, of course, there are privacy considerations (the infamous AOL case, &c.), but nothing insurmountable. Beyond these two points, it's vitally important that we able to arbitrarily query Wikidata soon. I'm hoping this functionality is live on Wikimedia wikis by the end of 2015. And speaking to APIs specifically, we really need to focus on projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource that are desperately in need of API support to serialize and add structure to what is currently very fragile blobs of wikitext markup. MZMcBride P.S. RIP, SAD. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
