690423 - Sort Mozillians in search results in score,name and in Groups by name

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Participation Infrastructure :: Phonebook, enhancement)

Description

[Tobias (:Tobbi) Markus]

For now, when searching, it's pretty hard to find the mozillian you were looking for, because they are not sorted in any way. 

IMO, we should implement that as a feature, sorting by first or last name, whatever works better.

Comment 1

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Tobbi, what specific searches are you performing? It'd be good to get a handle on the use case for the short-term.

Comment 2

[Tobias (:Tobbi) Markus]

(In reply to Aakash Desai [:aakashd] from comment #1)
> Tobbi, what specific searches are you performing? It'd be good to get a
> handle on the use case for the short-term.

When looking for a "dave" or "David" (assuming I just cannot remember the full first name) and search for dav, I see a few results sorted here:
https://www.mozillians.org/en-US/search?q=e+

You get m's at the top (which is clearly not the first letter there is)

Comment 3

[Jen Fong-Adwent [:ednapiranha]]

I think this is resolved now? Looks like it is working correctly in production.

Comment 4

[Ben (:bensternthal)]

I do not think this is resolved. The names might be sorted in someway but its impossible to tell via the UI. 

See screenshot of search result for "stern".. results are not sorted by last name or username... in any case we should say how we are sorting in the UI.

This will probably be worked on as par of a larger initiative to fix the UI/UX.

Comment 5

[Ben (:bensternthal)]

Attachment: Sorted by wat?

Comment 6

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

Talked with hoosteeno about this, and we agree it makes sense to sort results by name.

We're not sure if there's a sorting algorithm already in place, and if so, why it was picked. hoosteeno is going to look into this.

Comment 7

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

Are we sure that we want search results sorted by name? Wouldn't it be better to sort by relevancy to the search terms, assuming that Giorgos' changes have improved the search relevancy enough that it works okay?

Comment 8

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

I agree that good relevance scores should be our first sort criterion. But if I search for "Justin", won't most of the returned results have equivalent relevance? At that point an alphabetical sort makes sense.

Comment 9

[Giorgos Logiotatidis [:giorgos]]

The situation currently:

 - Current /search/ sorting based on ElasticSearch score, i.e. the first results is the closest to the query searched. Note that the current ElasticSearch configuration is not the best, so you may wonder why the first result scored that high, but that's another issue.

 - Current /group view/ sorting is based on 'id', i.e. it's looking random.


Proposed solution:

 - For search: Since this is search, the most relevant result should be on top. So we keep sorting by score. As per comment #8 we add as second sorting parameter the 'name'. Thus if you or more results have the same score, they will be sorted alphabetically. We're trying different ElasticSearch configurations to calculate better scores.

 - For group view: Sorting by name.

Comment 10

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

The proposed solution in comment 9 sounds good to me. We'll also have a better sense of how effective this is once we try several search queries on stage and then we can collect feedback from users once this lands on production. I feel this is definitely an improvement to current search results.

Comment 11

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/mozillians

https://github.com/mozilla/mozillians/commit/bdc2bfd294588661ab69ee5b336499a408211a28
[fix bug 690423] Order search results by _score,fullname. UserProfile by fullname.

Comment 12

[Matt Brandt [:mbrandt]]

Bumping to QA verified on stage - this lgtm on stage, I like williamr's suggestion (comment 10) that we let this flow to prod so we can collect additional feedback from users.