• mgiuca's avatar
    App launcher: Added Finch experiment for the search ranking algorithm. · 965f3753
    mgiuca authored
    Adds the "AppListMixer" Finch experiment, affecting the search result
    ranking and mixing in the App Launcher. By default, the mixer behaves
    exactly as before. With the "Blended" option, results are selected and
    ordered more naturally according to their relevance to the query, rather
    than in arbitrary groups ("apps, then omnibox, then webstore, then
    people").
    
    Specific changes under the "Blended" option:
    
    - Replaced the per-group "boost" with a per-group "multiplier". Now,
      instead of stratifying results from each group, they are mixed
      together according to the relevance score assigned by the provider.
      Some groups have a multiplier to de-prioritize them (people results
      x0.85, webstore results x0.4). This means that relevance scores now
      need to be comparable between groups!
    
    - Removed the 6-result limit from the mixer. It can now return an
      arbitrary number of results, which will later be truncated by the
      view. (This is necessary because the view now supports more than 6
      results, since all app results take up a single row.)
    
    - The per-group limit is now a "soft" limit. If there aren't enough
      total results to fill a minimum quota of 6, we go back and get as many
      results as we can from each group.
    
    - The omnibox group is no longer special. Previously, it had no limit,
      but would only provide more than 1 result if there was room. Now, it
      has a soft limit of 4, and behaves the same as other groups (can
      provide more results if necessary).
    
    Can be enabled with --force-fieldtrials=AppListMixer/Blended.
    
    BUG=487494,460451,422610,338418
    
    Review URL: https://codereview.chromium.org/1113483002
    
    Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#329601}
    965f3753
mixer_unittest.cc 14.2 KB