1261274 - Search for exact page title does not show that page in the results

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: API: DOM, defect)

Description

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

What did you do?
================
1. Go to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
2. Type "DOMContentLoaded" into the search box

What happened?
==============
The list of search results does not include https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/DOMContentLoaded.

What should have happened?
==========================
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/DOMContentLoaded should be the first search result.

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

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This is a duplicate of bug 1119577, I think.

Comment 2

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

At the end of March 2016, we push some changes that apply default topic filters if none are chosen. This was done to improve results for the most common queries (HTML, JS, etc.), as identified by analytics.  Before this change, it was likely that exact title matching would give bad results for some common queries, for example returning Firefox-specific APIs rather than the general web topics.  This change has made site search much better for the "general web" queries.  Site search is used by about 1.5% of visitors.

The results are also good with external search engines. With DuckDuckGo, the MDN page is the first result for DOMContentLoaded.
77% of our users arrive at the site from search engines.

Now that you have the background, on to this particular page:

The default filters make it very difficult to find pages that are not tagged with a topic, and less convenient to find pages tagged with a topic outside of the defaults.  DOMContentLoaded is an untagged page.  There is currently no way in the UI to say "don't filter by any target", but it can be done by changing the URL to an invalid topic:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=DOMContentLoaded&topic=none

The DOMContentLoaded now appears as the first result.  There may be an easy way to add "unfiltered search" to the UI, so that users can select the old behaviour by clicking a button or link.

Comment 3

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

The fact that this page has no 'tag' is a doc bug. We should add them and see what happens.

John: do you mind if we morph this in a doc bug. If tagging doesn't solve the problem, we may move it back to the MDN component and re-triage it.

Comment 4

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

If that solves this issue, then yes, the next task might be "tags all the docs". Moving to a doc bug for the experiment.

Comment 5

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

OK, but this problem predates the filter changes. At least, I've seen this for years. I know I have filed other bugs on this at least once or twice.

Comment 6

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I've added tags. Let's see if in a few days it will change (I have not added HTML for the moment, which is arguable). I'll revisit next Tuesday as we will triage this bug ;-)

Comment 7

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

We've added a new checkbox to the search, "All Topics". When this is selected, all the documents are searched.  With the default filter set, there are 1011 results and the the top result is:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/webNavigation/onDOMContentLoaded

Adding the tags does not appear to have helped, or maybe the tag isn't one of the default filter set.

With "All Topics" selected, there are 2623 results and the top result is:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/DOMContentLoaded

Marking as fixed.