I think the completion suggester will be a nice tool to help users, but I don't see how that is similar to solving the problem I described here, which is basically a big malfunction in wikimedia's search engine. The search engine should work well, regardlessly of the existence of a completion suggester. I'm worried about this ticket being closed without further action on that.

PS: To avoid any confusion, please note that when I say that the article "History of France" doesn't come up as the first result when you do a search of "history france" (as should be the case) I'm not talking about the prefixsearch results (the inmediate list of suggestions you get below the search box), as Deskana's comment seems to infer, but I'm talking about the search results you get from that search.

Please note that I opened this ticket to report NOT a problem with the prefixsearch, but a problem with Wikimedia's regular search results. Please see an example of an unsuccesful search in the image attached.

In T116706#1911466, @TTO wrote:

Reopening this. I think Dan misunderstood the reporter's comment.

Thanks. There wasn't much context for me to go on in the report, so I was left guessing.

In T116706#1911465, @Savig wrote:

Please see an example of an unsuccesful search in the image attached.

Thanks for the example. Can you give more? One example doesn't help us pin the problem down much.

Some more examples from enwiki:

• geography poland: "Geography of Poland" isn't on the first results page at all.
• history mexico: "History of Mexico" is seventh when it almost certainly should be first.
• A lot of searches for history X, where the article "History of X" exists, fail to show that article near the top of the search results.
• keys kingdom: "Keys to the Kingdom" is second, "Keys of the Kingdom" is a little way down, "The Keys to the Kingdom" isn't on the first results page.

Probably many more. And as the reporter points out, it's not just a problem for enwiki.

It's even worse, when you put in the search terms in the opposite order, which is a common way for people to search: for example poland politics doesn't show "Politics of Poland" in the first results page.

Let's see if BM25 can help with this?

Results look promising:

http://en-wp-bm25-relforge.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?search=geography+poland
http://en-wp-bm25-relforge.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?search=history+france

That's not normally a reason to decline a ticket. The usual practice is to leave it open until the parent task is fixed, then close it as "Resolved". Main rationales for this are (a) when the parent task is fixed, we are reminded to check whether this task is indeed fixed; and (b) helps others to locate this issue and reduces the chance of duplicate tasks being filed.

HI @TTO - I closed it because there isn't any work to be done specifically on this ticket, as it's being worked elsewhere. If you'd like it to be open but not actually worked on and located in the backlog, that's fine with me.