1155394 - (mdn-search-algorithm) [meta] Improve MDN search algorithm

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

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

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Searching on MDN would be more accurate and valuable to all users who depend on MDN's search ranking.

Who would use this?
===================
All users

What would users see?
=====================
Their desired result would be near the top of search results.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
They would get to what they need faster.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[Chuck Baker]

Whenever I use the search function on MDN, I get way too many irrelevant results. For instance, if I search for 'createTable' I get back 5,633 results. The results include the terms "create", "table", "tables", "creating", "create tables", and even "AudioContext.createWaveTable()". This is way too much to wade through when all I want is an exact match for "createTable".

It seems no matter what the search term is, MDN seems to take every possible permutation of the term and displays the results. Searching for "getElementsByTagName" gets 9,292 results!

Perhaps a "Sort by relevance" button would be appropriate. Better yet, always sort results by relevance.

Comment 2

[Chuck Baker]

Another example of how the search function is broken:  A search for "openNewTabWith" (camel case) returns over 6,000 documents, but "opennewtabwith" (all lower case) returns zero hits.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.