Discovery/Status updates/2016-12-05

This is the weekly update for the week starting 2016-12-05

Highlights

We've put together a draft proposal for how to deal with the interaction of all the possible additional search options—suggestions, quote-stripping, "wrong keyboard", language ID, etc.—to have a more co-ordinated conversation about all this. Comments on the talk page there are welcome.
Load tests for cross-project searching were completed successfully. We are now testing how many results are produced for typical queries as a first step towards figuring out how relevant the results are.
Upgraded to Java 8 in preparation for upgrading ElasticSearch next quarter. (T151325)
Performed some refactoring to improve interwiki searching. (T141033)
Improved handling of characters containing diacritics or accents. (T137830, T146402)
Added support for minimum query length to detect the language of the query. When a minimum length is eventually chosen, this will solve edge cases where some very short queries and queries consisting just of numbers could produce unexpected results. (T149318)
Fixed an edge case where third-party users of CirrusSearch could get an exception when building a completion suggester index. (T150799)

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