As part of T306644 the weights of the wbsearchentities prefix search on www.wikidata.org were tuned using historical click logs as a guide. To determine the effectiveness of this tuning an AB test was run from May 1 at 00:00 UTC until May 15 at 00:00 UTC. The test was limited to users performing searches for wikidata items in the English language. Users were divided equally on a per-page load basis into either the control or test bucket.
The analytics for this test collect usage from the various entity selectors used throughout the interface for editing Wikidata. The data also includes usage of the autocomplete on the top-right of all Wikidata pages, but due to a bug in the data collection the usage of the top-right autocomplete was only logged from entity pages.
The graphs below are all probability densities and annotated with 95% confidence intervals. The confidence intervals are constructed by running five thousand rounds of the bootstrap method.
| bucket | event | count |
|---|---|---|
| T306644-de | start | 5741 |
| T306644-de | click | 2884 |
| control | start | 5544 |
| control | click | 2853 |
The number of characters typed in each session is a proxy for the amount of effort a user must exert to find the item they are looking for. The 95% CI completely overlaps suggesting no improvement from the new tuning.
The ratio of page loads with start events against the page loads with click events is interepreted loosely as the abandonment rate of search. The 95% CI completely overlaps, suggesting the test treatment had no effect on abandonment rates. While this is consistent with previous tests, we don't know why so many sessions start but don't complete the entity selection.
The position of clicked result is another proxy for the amount of effort a user must exert to find the item they are looking for. The 95% CI overlaps, suggesting the new tuning did not improve click position.
Looking into the per-position metrics we can see clickthroughs are mostly unchanged, with the new tuning showing slightly worse performance on the 3rd and 4th position.