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Offer a titles-only search result
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Description

A titles-only search result, with zero extra post processing (no page ranking, no snippet, no highlighting, no page info, no parenthetical saying it matched the category or the redirect or the section) seems like an attractive, win-win feature.

The old search depended on page ranking, offering only intitle and incategory for parameters, and pouring out myriad results. Now we have many new Search features which eschew page-ranking, enabling us to finally target a specific set of pages with precision for the purpose of definitely handling each and every one.

Providing this would encourage:

  • post-processing those pages, targeting those titles in AWB
  • presenting those titles elsewhere, adding markup for wikilinks or checklists
  • comparing one query to another. A quick diff or cmp helps learn Search, diagnose Search, develop Search documentation

Other attractions are

  • five times more information per page
  • clean, relevant, uncluttered results compete with SpecialPages in general, PrefixIndex, WhatLinksHere, Categories in particular
  • an intitle search with titles only

I realize that the end-user who are post-processing can do it themselves.
But currently there is no obvious way to grep titles from Search results.
(Personally I have javaScript add an edit tag to each title, and can grep on that.)

Currently the end user must do the search, go to the bottom of the page and select a higher number of results (than the twenty), have the search done again, and then undo 1) the snippet 2) the document size and date (or category member counts), and 3) the parenthetical saying whether it matched in a category box, or matched in a redirect.

Event Timeline

Cpiral raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
Cpiral updated the task description. (Show Details)
Cpiral added a project: CirrusSearch.
Cpiral subscribed.
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript
Cpiral renamed this task from User option to remove contextual lines from search results to Search results consisting of titles only.Sep 26 2015, 10:03 AM
Cpiral updated the task description. (Show Details)
Cpiral set Security to None.

If you choose Gadgets, Editing gadgets,"Remove the visual editor from the user interface" it happens.

If you choose Gadgets, Editing gadgets,"Remove the visual editor from the user interface" it happens.

@Cpiral: Could you elaborate what is "it" in the context of this report?

Does the title "Search results consisting of titles only" describe a bug (and if yes, what are steps to reproduce)?
Does the title "Search results consisting of titles only" describe a feature request?

Aklapper renamed this task from Search results consisting of titles only to Allow search results to consist of titles only.Sep 28 2015, 9:19 AM

@Cpiral: Could you please answer the last comment?

@Cpiral: Could you please answer the last comment?

Deskana renamed this task from Allow search results to consist of titles only to Allow search results to omit highlighted snippets and consist of titles only.Dec 29 2015, 10:59 PM
Deskana triaged this task as Lowest priority.
Deskana subscribed.

Unless an engineer comes to me stating that we're having big performance issues with this, I will assume it's very low priority.

Deskana renamed this task from Allow search results to omit highlighted snippets and consist of titles only to Allow search results to omit highlighted snippets and consist of titles only in order to improve performance.Dec 29 2015, 11:00 PM
Deskana moved this task from Needs triage to Search on the Discovery-ARCHIVED board.
Cpiral renamed this task from Allow search results to omit highlighted snippets and consist of titles only in order to improve performance to Offer a titles-only search result.Jan 22 2016, 8:08 PM

@Aklapper and @Deskana,

I see the comment confusion now. Sorry. Also, sorry for the title confusion. Forgive me, thank you for your efforts, and please take care.
If ya'll remove confused comments. I will follow after.

I'm not sure if this exactly matches the use case described, but another user and I recently created a toolforge tool with the specialized purpose of searching by title. A couple of the features mentioned in this issue were explicit design goals:

  • Sparse presentation of results so that many can fit on the screen at once (no snippets, or metadata other than the title)
  • Easy comparison of results for different title queries (you can compare 2 or more queries in side-by-side panes)
  • Optionally excluding results that only match on a redirect rather than the actual title
CBogen raised the priority of this task from Lowest to Low.Aug 27 2020, 9:59 PM
MPhamWMF subscribed.

Closing out low/est priority tasks over 6 months old with no activity within last 6 months in order to clean out the backlog of tickets we will not be addressing in the near term. Please feel free to reopen if you think a ticket is important, but bare in mind that given current priorities and resourcing, it is unlikely for the Search team to pick up these tasks for the indefinite future. We hope that the requested changes have either been addressed by or made irrelevant by work the team has done or is doing -- e.g. upgrading Elasticsearch to a newer version will solve various ES-related problems -- or will be subsumed by future work in a more generalized way.

RhinosF1 removed a project: Discovery-Search.
RhinosF1 subscribed.

Re-opening tasks and removing from team workboard per IRC feedback given yesterday and discussion with MPham.