890857 - Add-on tags should be searchable

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Search, defect)

Description

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130618035212

Steps to reproduce:

Test case: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/addon/the-puzzle-piece (of which I am the developer).

The tags field is currently: "add-on bar, addon bar, auto-hide, autohide, location bar, restartless, urlbar" ("restartless" was of course automatically added).

Using many combinations of these tags in the "search for add-ons" field doesn't display The Puzzle Piece in the results.


Actual results:

Search query: TPP listing shown or not shown in results

"addon bar": not shown
"add-on bar": shown (maybe because this expression is also in the short description)
"autohide": not shown
"auto-hide": not shown
"location bar": shown (odd)
"urlbar": not shown
"restartless": not shown (this is just wrong!)

"The Puzzle Piece": shown
"Puzzle": shown
"add-on bar autohide": not shown
"add-on bar urlbar": not shown


Expected results:

When inputing some word in the "search for add-ons" field, I would expect the results to also include all add-ons that have those words in their "tags" field. I thought this was the main point tags existed in the first place, and have been filling these fields in my add-on listings accordingly. At the very least, it seems much more logical than just "filtering" results when searching for add-ons.

Comment 1

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

Case in point: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-puzzle-piece/reviews/485250/

I won't rename the add-on like this user suggested in the review for the same reason I won't rename any of my other add-ons. The name should be something that identifies the add-on while giving the user a quick notion of what the add-on is all about (in this case, it adds "puzzle pieces" to the UI that control the add-on bar, hence the name); it shouldn't be a listing of the add-ons features.

When you are searching for add-ons, if you are searching for a feature that you want such as "autohide", rather than for the name of the add-on which you rarely know beforehand, you may never find it in the first place. The tags field would be a huge aid here.

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

If I search for "skja" (I have no idea what that means or who tagged my add-on like that), I get Fire.fm.

If I search for "urlbar auto-hide" I get yours.

The search code does many "clever" things like breaking out compound words, so I wouldn't be surprised that search for something like "add-on bar" doesn't yield anything useful.

Comment 3

[Luís Miguel [:quicksaver] (not reading bugmail)]

Hmm it's true, most of the terms I mentioned before now correctly show the add-on. I'm guessing there's some kind of search cache happening backstage, that simply didn't have those terms for my add-on back then, and now it does.