[packagekit] Simpler search

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Mittwoch, den 13.02.2008, 19:31 +0000 schrieb Richard Hughes:
> On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 20:28 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> > On Feb 13, 2008 8:24 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 14:11 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
> > > > What do you think about combining the name/description search options
> > > > in the pk-application UI?  It seems unlikely that the user really cares
> > > > whether the term he is searching for matches the name or the
> > > > description.  Can we combine those two options, or have a default
> > > > search option that searches by name, then description?
> > >
> > > Well, I don't think we should combine the search in the backend (i.e. 2
> > > methods into 1) as some clients may just want a simple search and not
> > > want the extended search as it may require downloading metadata.
> > >
> > > It might be a good idea to default to a "both" search option in the UI
> > > that does a simple search then a detailed search on the same query.
> > 
> > >From a usability POV these should really be one.
> 
> I'm not so sure (but up for a lively debate :-) - I often _know_ the
> package name of something I want to install, for instance "kpowersave".
> 
> Sometimes I'm just searching for "gokart" and want deeper searching to
> find supertuxkart.
> 
> Richard.

In GNOME-app-install we only have got one central search entry, but we
use different weights for several match types. If the name matches the
result gets a higher weight as if only the description would match.
Furthermore we use the data from the popularity contest (users can agree
to automatically send aggregated data about the installed software and
how often it was used to a central database) to sort the software by
'relevance'.

To still make a life search possible we use a small time out in the
search entry: one second after the last change in the entry box we start
the search.

To be honest the search data is quite limited, since we only have got
nearly 1800 applications/packages, but on the other side the search code
was never really optimised. I hope that the xapian database could be of
great use here.

Cheers,

Sebastian
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