Last modified: 2014-10-24 11:05:40 UTC
Auto-suggest (skins/common/mwsuggest.js) is fantastic for users, but it also confuses users when redirects are displayed. When someone types "tree frog" into the Wikipedia search box and pauses, they see four redundant entries in the dropdown: Tree Frog Tree frog Tree frogs Tree Frogs This redundancy is confusing to users -- "Which one do I choose?" they ask. I see this all the time at my company. People are actually afraid they might choose the wrong one, not realizing that they all lead to the same article. I'm NOT suggesting you remove redirects from the dropdown - they are very important when the redirect is very different from the article title. But surely this list can be pruned to reduce confusion? I suggest that a redirect should be OMITTED from the autosuggest dropdown if BOTH of the following are true: - The target article's title also appears in the dropdown; AND, - The redirect's title is highly similar to the target article's title What is "highly similar"? - Identical except for upper/lower case - Identical except for 1-3 trailing characters? - Other clever rules? I also suggest this pruning feature should be controlled by a global variable ($wgMWSuggestPruning = true) and a user preference.
(In reply to Dan Barrett from comment #0) > Auto-suggest (skins/common/mwsuggest.js) is fantastic for users, but it also > confuses users when redirects are displayed. mwsuggest was replaxed by SimpleSearch in https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40448 - is this still an issue?
Yes, SimpleSearch also displays every match, so it's subject to the same issue.
