User:Andrewa/How WP search handles ambiguity

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It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

This page in a nutshell: It's often assumed (sometimes subtly) that having an article at an ambiguous name makes it easier to find using Wikipedia's search box.
In fact the very opposite is the case. And other search engines don't do much better.

In that all pages belong to the whole project, any user may edit this one. But it's generally more helpful (and polite) to discuss the proposed change on its talk page first.

Just consider someone is searching for The Americans (2013 TV series) (as one user recently was, but using Bing [1]) so they type The Americans into the WP search box.

Currently, there's a DAB at the base name The Americans, so they get ten hits (not including the DAB) in the results list, all of them at unambiguous names and with the required article at the top of the list. Success.

But suppose we were to move the 2013 series article to the base name, persuaded (probably by page view stats) that it was Primary Topic. What would happen?

Not a great problem! The resulting redirect would save us. But that's all that would save us. If the article had always been at the base name, it's a very different story.

Without the redirect, there would be no hit that unambiguously referred to the 2013 series. The user could do one of two things:

They could go to the base name. Most but not all users would do this. Success.
They could give up. Disaster.

They couldn't go to the DAB, even if they knew what (disambiguation) means, because it wouldn't be on the list.

External search engines would handle this slightly better, by displaying the DAB and giving a third option. Some but not all users will try the DAB.

On the other hand, if the article they want is at an unambiguous name, all users of all search engines get success with the very next mouse click.

More to follow