1311144 - Generate a score for a highlights initially using the site's available metadata

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for iOS :: Home screen, defect, P1)

Description

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

For the first pass at implementing a scoring algorithm for how we pick which highlights and in which order we want to show, we want to see if a potential highlight has:

1. Associated metadata available
2. A rich preview image as part of that metadata

The idea is that we want to surface sites that are more visual appealing on our highlights list.

Comment 1

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

I remember hearing that this wont be required for v1? Or are we still doing this. 

Are there any improvements we have to make to the highlight algorithm besides this?

Comment 2

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

IIRC Sebastian has been working on a scoring implementation on Android for the past while and Desktop has been iterating over what the implementation looks like. In previous discussions it seemed that in terms of priorities getting rich metadata (images) is higher on the list than getting the scoring algorithm in but with Emily working on that I guess that frees us up to look towards implementing some kind of scoring. There are some items I could see us doing before we get scoring involved such as a mechanism to run A/B tests (probably using Switchboard which Android uses).

TBH I could see us shipping a version to our production users that doesn't include any scoring just to collect some data first. 

Re-assigning the NI to :barbara for her thoughts.

Comment 3

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

I confirm/agree.

1) Include minimal scoring (as per Steph's suggestion) for MVP
2) Ideally, we have an A/B mechanism in place, and then can validate/iterate on the scoring.
3) Ship and collect information

Comment 4

[Farhan Patel [:farhan]]

We could probably do some minimal ranking of highlights for the MVP.

Comment 5

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Attachment: GitHub Pull Request

Farhan, I'm not 100% sure I'm on the right track here, so let me know if you think the "score" should be weighted differently. This patch prioritizes having an icon above all else followed by visitCount. Additional points are given for being bookmarked, having a title, a description and a media_url.

Comment 6

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Attachment: GitHub Pull Request

Farhan, here's a new PR that adds scoring in `computeHighlightsQuery()` instead.

Comment 7

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Landed on master:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/commit/0c6ca4a4705f15a095e6b5ad414bcf4302f01d43