This proposal is a larger suggestion that is out of scope for the Community Tech team. Participants are welcome to vote on it, but please note that regardless of popularity, there is no guarantee this proposal will be implemented. Supporting the idea helps communicate its urgency to the broader movement.
Problem: There are many titles that make good redirects but which should not appear in search suggestions because they crowd out better targets, for example misspellings.
Proposed solution: Add a magic word that (a) hides these titles in search suggestions (possibly excluding exact matches), (b) prioritises the redirect target in suggestions and search results, and (c) deprioritises tagged redirects in search results.
Who would benefit: Readers, anyone else who uses search suggestions
More comments: There is often pushback about keeping redirects from incorrect names, unusual phrasings, spelling errors, etc, even when they demonstrably help some readers find the content they are looking for because they appear in search suggestions ahead of correct names hindering a different group of readers finding the content they want to read. Suppressing such titles from the search suggestions dropdown has been a perennial proposal for many years at en.wp and the phab task linked below indicated it's been perennial on the Hungarian Wikipedia too since at least 2010.
I've never experienced this as a problem.. what exactly do you mean with 'crowd out'? Can you describe that in a bit more detail, preferably with example links/searches ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:05, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Ah so specifically ONLY for the search field's search suggestions... I guess I can see that.. we have similar problem with vulgar language etc. The traditional solution is to delete or even suppress the page yes. Of note might be that the need to keep redirects from spelling corrections is not as high any longer as the search has fuzzy matching to deal with typos these days. So maybe its actually better indeed to delete many of these. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:49, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If the internal search engine was the only way people accessed Wikipedia content then that would be a valid argument, but its only one of many ways - direct links, URIs, bookmarks, etc. all take you to the exact title you entered. Thryduulf (talk: meta · en.wp · wikidata) 17:38, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hello @Thryduulf, I talked to the Search team about this one yesterday and they like it would like to discuss it more and it sounded like they might have to even implement it themselves due to its complexity. They really appreciate the idea! So I will discuss with the CommTech team, I don't want to give the false impression that the CommTech team can implement it and let people vote if it's too big for us. KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 11:09, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Thryduulf, the Search team talked about this recently and I can share some of our thoughts. Currently, the WMF Desktop Refresh team is currently working on a better user experience for search completions (i.e. the title matching search suggestions referred to here): while not exactly the same, there is an open ticket to resolve redirects within the list of suggested search completions (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T296225). This should at least partially address the concern here that irrelevant suggested redirects will crowd the list of suggestions, as the user will see the resolved redirect title after this change is made (rather than the title of the redirected page itself). There are certainly other potential edge cases that might not be desirable after this change, but I think it makes sense to wait until after the desktop refresh work is done to re-evaluate the new behavior and how it can be improved with respect to which completions are suggested. Hope that helps, and thanks for the thoughts and ideas! MPham (WMF) (talk) 22:41, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for that note. Having read T296225 I think that has the potential to be actively harmful (as I have commented there) and will not actually solve this problem in all cases so I disagree that prioritising that is a Good Thing. Thryduulf (talk: meta · en.wp · wikidata) 03:13, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Thryduulf for commenting over there, I couldn't have stated it any better. While it could be useful to have some kind of tag on redirect pages so that they don't show up in searches (or at least not with the same priority), replacing the name of the redirect page by its target page in the search will definitely be harmful in many cases and would undermine many uses of redirects. Hopefully, this will not be implemented this way. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support the ability for editors to use simple keywords to alter the visibility (or ordering) of pages in the dropdown search engine, but Oppose the replacement of redirect titles by the page they redirect to per Thryduulf's Phabricator comment. — Bilorv (talk) 17:09, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support – There's an extensive system of redirect categorisation on enwiki, and much of of is about distinguishing between correct alternative names and typos/misspellings/misnomers. It's high time this system were used by the search engine. I don't think simply excluding the "incorrect" redirects is a good idea (what about the people who make the typo when searching?), but assigning them lower priority will be good. Uanfala (talk) 22:24, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support * Pppery * it has begun 19:04, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Oppose the replacement of redirect titles by the page they redirect to per Thryduulf's Phabricator comment. — Bilorv (talk) 17:09, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
