By Wikimedia Foundation | Completion Suggester
Wikipedia’s search algorithm saw major improvements in March with the debut of our “completion suggester.” Now, even if users misspell or leave out words in a query, the search box assists the users by listing potentially relevant results, prioritizing the most frequently visited pages first. For example, if you’re searching for “Disneyland” but you accidentally type in “Dizeny,” our tool displays results which may be related. The completion suggester, and its ability to recognize typos and users' intentions, replaces our “prefix searching” algorithm, which relied on identifying the initial letters of users’ search terms. Its introduction is a major development because the portal page alone at wikipedia.org gets around 10 million daily pageviews, which is roughly 1.5 to 2% of our total pageviews. Users say they love the new tool. We do, too.
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