[EM] "Instant-runoff voting" article renamed to "Ranked-choice voting" on English Wikipedia

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2024-10-23 18:38, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
> Stemming hasn't been a thing for a very long time now, so a modern 
> search engine shouldn't have issues identifying "Instant-runoff" and 
> "Alternative vote" as synonyms. (In fact, what you say suggests 
> Wikipedia doesn't follow redirects, because the page you found is 
> Instant-runoff voting and not the Alternative vote redirect.)
> 
> I suspect the articles "Ranked voting" and "Ranked-choice voting in the 
> United States" are interfering with the search somehow, by making it 
> seem like there are other Wikipedia articles more closely related to the 
> topic than the instant-runoff voting article.

Apparently I expressed myself in a muddled way. That was not my point; 
let's try again.

What I am suggesting is that:
	1. Google does not automatically list the Wikipedia page for X as the 
first entry for search term X,
and
	2. Google may follow redirects so that if you search for X, and the 
Wikipedia page for X redirects to Y, you will get Y as the first 
Wikipedia result.

Point one, if true, means that one can't conclude that relabeling 
"instant-runoff voting" to "ranked choice voting" would push the 
Wikipedia page above the Fairvote, etc. pages as a natural consequence.

Point two, if true, means that you do not need to explicitly move 
"instant-runoff voting" to "ranked choice voting" to get the benefits of 
Google exposure; just making "ranked choice voting" a redirect to 
"instant-runoff voting" will give you the same Google benefit when 
Google updates its index to reflect the change.

If both are true, it indicates that we can't reject the hypothesis that 
there would be no particular benefit to renaming the instant-runoff 
voting article to "ranked choice voting", at least not as far as Google 
indexing effects are concerned.


My evidence for number one is that there are plenty of search terms that 
you can search for that does not return its Wikipedia article as the 
first match. In retrospect, it's kind of obvious. For instance, you can 
search for, I don't know, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", and the 
IMDB page, not the Wikipedia article, will be the first match on Google.

My evidence for number two is that searching for terms that are similar 
to the target term often give the target term as the first Wikipedia 
article. Let's go through the examples I provided.

a. "Set covering" leads to "set cover problem", i.e. returns the 
Wikipedia article on the latter as its first Wikipedia match. You 
suggested that this is just Google doing fuzzy matching and thus 
changing "set covering" to "set cover problem" internally. Okay, let's 
suppose for the time being that that is true.

b. "Alternative vote" leads to "instant-runoff voting". Again you 
suggest that Google is just doing some kind of synonym parsing, and that 
it's not actually following redirects; and as evidence, you state that 
if Google were following redirects, it should have returned the redirect 
instead of the instant-runoff voting article as its first Wikipedia match.

But here I was apparently a bit unclear, because I didn't mean to say 
that Google would index redirects. Instead, I was saying that it would 
follow them transparently, much like a HTTP redirect. The expected 
behavior would then be that the crawler finds "alternative vote", makes 
a note that this redirects to "instant-runoff voting", and thus, follow 
the redirect and index "instant-runoff voting" for the search term 
"alternative vote".

This is consistent with its actual behavior: going to the alternative 
vote page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_vote?redirect=no, 
shows that it's a redirect to the IRV page. Furthermore, searching for 
"alternative vote" returns, at least to me, the instant-runoff voting 
page as the first Wikipedia result.

c. "Top-two runoff" leads to "two-round system". This would also seem to 
suggest that Google follows redirects, since 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-two_runoff?redirect=no is a redirect 
to the "Two-round system" page; that either Google follows redirects or 
that its synonym handling or aliasing system in practice produces the 
same effect.

Now, you seem to suggest the latter, that due to its synonym handling, 
Google should '[have no] issues identifying "Instant-runoff" and 
"Alternative vote" as synonyms'.

However: if it has no problem identifying these as synonyms (whether it 
is by following redirect links or by some other means), then it 
shouldn't have a problem identifying "instant-runoff voting" and 
"ranked-choice voting" as synonyms, either.

If Google already identifies instant-runoff voting and ranked choice 
voting as synonyms, then there's little point in relabeling the page to 
make it visible to Google, because it already *is* visible to Google. 
And if it doesn't, then one has to come up with a more complex theory 
that would explain why Google has no problem identifying IRV and AV as 
synonyms and no problem identifying top-two and two-round as synonyms, 
but would have a problem identifying IRV and RCV as synonyms.

-km