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Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improved autosuggest in default search

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Search should be better at handling typos Open

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Description

The default search has an "autosuggest" feature for when it can't find an exact match on page title, but it's very limited. It lacks the ability to handle common typos such as inputting a character extra times. Thus, even if a search query differs from an existing page title by e.g. the addition of an extra character, the suggest doesn't find it and tends to give only distantly related suggested results, likely not what the searcher was looking for. This seriously reduces the usefulness of it for the Average Joe. (So they mostly use external search engines instead.)

One example: Australite is an article, but a search for "Australlite" instead gives suggested results about "Australie". The relevant fancy term here is "edit distance": how similar two strings of text are. Many algorithms and software libraries exist for determining "edit distance" between strings, for functions such as spelling correction.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Unknown

All projects

Affected users

Anyone using search on Wikimedia projects

Other details

  • Created: 03:46, 21 August 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 15:31, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
  • Author: Slowking Man (talk)