Re: Categorizing search results

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 21:09, Stewart Lord <stewey@ambitious.ca> wrote: > On 2010-12-29, at 3:40 AM, Hannes Magnusson wrote: > >> Hi >> >> I've looked into improving the search to also provide categorization >> and descriptions. >> ... >> I killed the actual order-by-score, and also lowered the minScore >> value (didn't work so great for long function/variable names where you >> typed only few characters..). That should probably be updated if we >> decide to commit this. >> ... >> What do you guys think, is it worth perusing? >> Its not searching in the descriptions.. Unsure if its worth it.. > > > Wow! I should have looked at this before my previous response. I applied your patch. Cool > stuff! I think this is worth pursuing. Not too sure where it sits in terms of priority though. There > is a fair bit more work here. > We need someone to design the frontpage and download page.. And add some padding between paragraphs. And maybe fix the cross-browser issues. Once that is done, I'm ok with going live, and dealing with whatever there is left then. I fear if we wait until everything is perfect we will start loosing interest again and we have to wait another year for more activity. Also, working by priority lists makes it hard accommodate the 'scratch an itch' drive-by contributions :P Having just a normal todo list would be nice. I'd love if someone would post a todo list to this list :D > If I search for 'str', I no longer see the matching str* functions first. It is not > obvious how to determine the most relevant results. By grouping them into categories we are forced > into putting lower scoring matches before higher scoring matches in a different category. What do > you think about my poor-man's categorization? > Yeah.. The ranking is a PITA with categorizing. We could still sort the hits per-category by ranking, but which category should be first? - Whoever has the best match? Then the order would change on every keystroke, making it quite confusing to quickly select an item - Fixed category order Wouldn't list the best match first.. I think people would typically write the entire function name into the search, and simply treat it as php.net/<lookup>, and/or maybe to get a list of functions in an extension or methods of a class.. then select whatever they were looking for. The "poor-man's categorization" (haha) way.. not a great fan.. doesn't feel like it adds any value really. I can commit a patch to PhD that generates that kind of index though. And if we decide to order by category then that can easily be done in js I guess. I did have some issues with the js though, the index is quite large.. about 15.000 entries.. but that was when it sorted all entries on each keystroke. > ...I think there is also the risk of hitting the user with too much information and visual > noise. I don't know.. I find it hard to believe that people would actually treat the autcomplete as a fully featured search.. after all; its autocomplete hints, not a search. To search you have to hit 'enter' after writing the query.. In my mind thats 2 different thing. And if we decide to go with a huge search box on the frontpage, I would even want to add more visual bling bling :P > > Regarding the option in my.php, it's not something I would use. I suspect that most users > would just go with the default. Yeah, thats true. But isn't that because the current alternatives there are kindof useless, and not really many people aware of the actual choice? If we would actually provide useful options.. that could change? -Hannes