405410 - Addons search doesn't find "Tab Kit" addon when I search for "tabkit"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Administration, enhancement)

Description

[Håkan Waara]

I just went to addons.mozilla.com, and tried to find a plugin that a friend had recommended to me: Tab Kit. What I'd heard was "tabkit", so I assumed it was one word. No results.

After som googling and reading of random people's weblogs, I found a link. It was named "Tab kit".

I think the addons search should, in a perfect world, find this extension even if I miss the space, if possible. :-)

Comment 1

[Mike Shaver (:shaver -- probably not reading bugmail closely)]

In the past, I've used search systems that would do spaceless matching, and in addition to being abhorrently slow (though I think that's avoidable), they gave a lot of false positives.  I would recommend WONTFIX here, and am especially heartened in that recommendation by the fact that Google doesn't even do what you want. :)

We could add advice to the results if too few results are found, recommending that people try without as many words; I don't know if others find such advice helpful, and my librarian wife made a face when I asked her.

Comment 2

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Suggestion-wise, Google does indeed do that, however they match it against a vast amount of stored (previously executed) search terms. We could do that too (suggesting popular searches within, e.g., a particular Hamming distance to the current one), but without a decently-sized (and properly cleaned-up) collection of popular search terms, this may likely lead to poor results and unsatisfying, thus hardly useful suggestions.

Comment 3

[Håkan Waara]

I agree that this would only make sense performance-wise if you check it against previously stored variations of the name. 

For example, when a new addon "tab kit" is added, you could have a table where you store "tabkit", "tab-kit" and some other obvious variations, which could then be searched in the case where there are few matches.

I do think this bug has a valid use case, and that fixing it could help a lot of users; at least for me as a non-native english speaker the difference between "tab kit", "tab-kit" and "tabkit" is not immediate, I mean, they do spell it webkit, right? 

But if I was face-to-face to Shaver's librarian wife, I would of course never admit such a silly mistake! ;-)

Comment 4

[RNicoletto]

Just for your information, searching for "Tab Mix Plus" or simply "Plus" (normal/advanced search doesn't make difference) gave ZERO results.

There are lots of AMO Search related bugs; what about completely drop AMO internal search engine and simply let Google do his job? (see attachment)

Comment 5

[RNicoletto]

Attachment: Why Google is better than AMO search engine

Comment 6

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

I am closing this for several reasons: "tabkit" now finds Tab Kit, but the reason is not an algorithm change: Instead, the string "tabkit" shows up in the add-on's description as part of a URL.

Second, we have put a considerable amount of work in our search, and it is doing very well now, as far as I can tell. Though, the use of MySQL's fulltext index restricts us to its capabilities, and combining words is not one of them.

Third, even comment 4 is fixed meanwhile, in spite of it describing a problem that is a different bug.

All in all, I think we have done the most we can do right now, and I hope the OP is satisfied.