User blog comment:Daniel Baran/Search Developments: Big Picture/@comment-1649337-20120510113731

Guys, just have a poll. You say you did a lot of research, done careful decision making, and doing all sorts of things to find the thing that is best, but have you even considered just asking people what would be the best? You can have a lot of research, but research isn't the answer to everything. It doesn't help to research if a group of children wants to go swimming. You could check the temperature, wind speeds, if it's cloudy, if it's holiday, etc, etc, but if you'd just ask them, you wouldn't have to consider all those things, and you would be absolutely sure if they want it or not. This may not be the best example, but my point is, if you make something awesome, but everyone hates it, it's not good, and you should not force people to have it.

What I think would be really useful to increase search functionality would be regex-redirecting. For example, redirecting the page "Troll(ing)?" to "Internet troll", to give an example, would decrease the amount of pages needed to redirect to that from 2 to 1. If you would apply that to this list of redirects, you could replace a lot of those with just a regular expression "(the )?ritual of (the )?mah?jarr[ea]ts?". That would redirect countless pages (literally over 9000 with ignorecase) which would make it a very much easier job creating redirects.