User blog comment:Dopp/Updates to How We Search/@comment-3508190-20120507145517/@comment-957747-20120507191110

Yeah, I mentioned a similar solution to Dopp in Skype a week ago too. Here's an excerpt.

"'Our original intentions for the change are described in the blog post, and we need to continue with the plan at this time for those reasons: we need more data about search behavior in order to improve results, and we want to experiment with surfacing the tool to readers so they can discover more wiki content.'"

"How does that warrant a change from what was already the norm? The only advantage I see is being able to search wiki-wide for terms that already exist as page names. But... that has to be a minority of searches. This change seems to be regressive in the sense that those searches that would normally land someone on a page now lands them on a search page. Granted, the exact matches are listed at the top, but I wish there was another way."

"My suggestion was to keep the former functionality but add a new MW message and utilize the notification system to show something similar to 'Your search for ' ' redirected you here. To do a search for ' ' click here.'"

"That gives the user the choice and 'should' still land the majority where they are intending to go. Good wikis have redirects so that searches are not required to find what they are searching for. This change destroys all that work since the redirects are no longer doing their intended job."

I also agree that this would be the best course of action.