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How are project search results sorted?
I can't figure out what field you use to sort project search results.
No field that you can see.
The sort is generated on the fly. It's a combination of a relevance ranking generated by tsearch2 (the stemming search index software we use) and a weighting factor based on stack counts.
The search was optimized to give good yields when searching for particular projects. I admit it's not very good at broad keyword browsing, but the main problem we wanted to solve was people looking for but not finding a known project.
Robin,
I see the point, but maybe there's something amiss with your relevance ranking/weighting algorithm if, for example, searching for wiki the most popular wiki engine (MediaWiki, 265 stacks) only shows up on page 2 after several projects among which an unknown Eclipse plugin, stacked by a single user. Our own wiki engine (WikkaWiki) or another pretty popular engine like MoinMoin, both show up on page 3, regardless of the number of people who stacked them (they actually come after an ugly lot of projects stacked by a single user). I find this a bit inaccurate, if the purpose of the search is to rank projects by relevance and popularity.
On a related note, the sorting criteria for user reviews are quite cryptic as well: it's pretty hard to find a review from a project's page when it's linked from the Recent Reviews section on the homepage. If you don't want to sort reviews by date (with latest first, for example), please add at least a link pointing to the #review_id, this would make it much more usable.
update: since your long tail
crawl, this problem got even worse. None of the most popular wiki engines shows up in a search for term wiki in the first 200 results, which are mostly unknown projects with 0 reviews, 0 ratings, 0 contributors, no code analysis.
This makes the search form virtually useless.
And if you want to save the exact match
functionality you probably just need to add a condition to your search script to send exact matches (case-insensitively matched) straight to the corresponding item (as Wikipedia does) or rank results by popularity or some other sensible metric otherwise.
Hi dartar,
Agreed, and we are working on this right now.
We've been building a new search engine which we hope will serve us better over the long haul, but obviously it still has a lot of holes.
For various complicated technical reasons it is taking us a while to deploy fixes, but we are working on it.
Thanks,
Robin
hi dartar,
I made some changes to the search index/engine. The wiki search results seems better now. I'd appreciate some feedback on how I could improve the results.
