349430 - Addons.mozilla.org/AMO Search is in need of overhaul - finding extensions is cumbersome

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, defect)

Description

[RenegadeX]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060710 Firefox/2.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b1) Gecko/20060710 Firefox/2.0b1

Searching for extensions (and themes) on AMO is a frustrating, cumbersome, and time-wasting experience. Often, a Search (with the default settings) does NOT provide a #1 (or often even a first-page) Result for the extension that the user had hoped to find. Using the 'Search Options' dropdown helps a little, but is tedious and largely ineffective in helping pin-down extensions when the actual name of the extension is not known. Both complaints are due to the fact that the search mechanism seems to give prominence to descriptions rather than titles, and the Results are displayed by default as by "Last Update" date, not in alphabetical or relevance order. Additionally, there is an absence of a sorely-needed feature that would allow AMO visitors to 'Browse all Extensions/Themes by letter', which again would help users find what they're looking for without having to click 'Show Options' and then picking from multiple dropdowns. Thus, I believe AMO needs an overhaul, or at least a re-think of how it presents itself.

I am aware that there are existing Bugs filed suggested/requesting/complaining about AMO searches - however resolving each of these individually seems to be slow in coming, and may lead to some inevitable overlap or redundancy. Hence my filing of this separate Bug to improve the entire site (which, I note still says is in 'Beta').
(Ref: Bug 278940, Bug 327316, Bug 348476)

Couple of issues:
1) There is currently no available (alphabetized) list of all extensions available. Preferably, users should be able to browse 'All' extensions and themes (separately), and also alphabetically by Category. It should be possible for a user to either click on any letter 'a','b','c','d', etc and view all extensions for that letter. A dropdown might at the top &/or bottom of the page might allow users to set how many items are viewable on each page.
** In this 'view', only pertinent information should be visible. ie: Extension/Theme name, Version#, Author, brief 1-line description, O/S, Rating, Release/Last Update Date. No picture should be displayed here - the idea is to present a concise browse-able list of extensions, along the lines of what is done at TEM (http://extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showforum=2), but better.
*** Possible 'Advanced' or future enhancement - a 'concise/detailed info Switch' at the top of the page, which, when checked for 'detailed' mode would expand each extension item with full list info (ie: what we have now - paragraph description/screencap image).
**** A good reason for this feature to be added - certain extensions are available, but not on AMO, for whatever reason (ex: BugMeNot). A user can waste time typing "Bug", "Bug Me Not", "BugMe", etc and come up with nothing relevant - no surprise as it's not even on AMO. An alphabetized list would proove/confirm this at a glance of the eye.

2) Search results are not chosen based on relevance to the extension title, they seem to be based on relevance to Description text. It should (by Default) be the other way around, as the queried word is often found in extension Descriptions that have nothing to do with what was being searched for.
ex: Looking for "Translation Panel" extension, so I query the word "translation". Lots of hits where an extension's description says "Email me if you can offer a translation in your native language", etc.
ex: First result for another search may show "Working on compatibility issue with %xyz-extension%." Do I care if I don't use/don't plan to use the extension that carried that text in its Description? No.
I'll also include here, as part of this flaw, the fact that Searches don't search the 'Author' field (Bug 348476) - as it's representational of the limitation of the current search method.

3. By default, Search Results are currently displayed by "Last Update" date. 
For the majority of users - the resulting list is often largely irrelevant. If a user types a part of the name of an extension, it doesn't matter to me or them whether the extension was updated today or 2 months ago, what is important is that the text searched finds first the NAME of the extension (followed by results relevant to the description text). To be totally fair, we DON'T know how each individual user is going to want their Results displayed - therefore, instead of assuming it's going to be by "Last Update" date, AMO might be advised to provide a dropdown box next to the text-entry box with "by Title"(<-default, I would suggest), "By Description", "By Author", "By Rating", "By Popularity", "By Last Update date", and even "By Release Date".

Ideally, a user should be able to search for the queried text IN whatever 'field' they like, and have the results SORTED by whatever field they like.

Perhaps one of the reasons I am frequently annoyed with AMO searches is because I use a bookmarked keyword to perform my searches from the Location Bar. I can't narrow down my searches by picking from the 'Show Options' dropdown as I'm not even on the page when I search, so my results suffer. Ditto 'Search Bar' queries.

Thus, either the Searches should provide more relevant results, or .. AMO should provide the ability to set a user's Search Preferences by cookie. Thus if my above suggestions were implemented, a 'seaach in Name', 'sort by Popularity', 'show 25 results/page' query could be performed successfully with precise (expected) results even from a keyword or Search Bar search.

So, how about it?

Reproducible: Always




--
I am a 'power user' with over 20 years computer experience, yet even I find myself frustrated, disappointed, sometimes angry even - that the default AMO Search rarely provides me with the information I'm looking for. I can only imagine what frustrations a 'basic' user or newcomer to Firefox and AMO must encounter.

Let's be honest, Firefox without extensions is pretty bland - extensions are what makes Firefox come to life, what 'sells' it to newcomers and what keeps long-time users enthused. Therefore, AMO should be a tip-top, easy-to-use, professional and polished 'showroom' in which to show off the many wonderful things that Firefox enables its users to do. And the key to this is providing a quick, easy to use Search.

Comment 1

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

These are indeed important issues to solve, and we're working on some of them already, but it's much much easier and more productive to work with bugs that describe a single issue with some relatively crisp problem statement.

If you could bring yourself to file specific bugs, or sketch the individual behaviours you'd like to see in the wiki (at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora_Idea_Dump or a page linked from there, perhaps), that would be wonderful.

Thanks for your time!

Comment 2

[Ron]

One particularly frustrating issue I have with the extensions search page is the following:

Whenever I set up a new installation of Firefox, the first two extensions I install are "adblock" and "flashblock".  Those are their exact names.  

When I type that name into the search page, the first hit is 'iMacros' which has nothing to do with either extension.  In reading the text of iMacros, it mentions compatibility with a large number of extensions ("iMacros can be combined with other extensions such as Greasemonkey, Web Developer, Firebug, Download Statusbar, NoScript, Tab Effect, Fasterfox, SwitchProxy, Foxyproxy, Flashblock or Adblock without any problems.") .. whether intentional or not, this seems like an artificial way to get your spiffy new extension to sort to the top of the list when someone searches for an extension that isn't yours.  

I'd like to see searches which yield an exact match by extension name to sort to the #1 position.  

Comment 4

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

The new AMO's search page works better than that: For example, search for "adblock":

http://preview.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=adblock

As you see the order is better than what you describe for AMOv2, Ron. While this doesn't mean that the AMOv3 search algorithm is perfect and not improvable, the improvement over AMOv2 is significant.

After launching the new AMO site, we should mark this fixed.

Comment 5

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

As per comment 4, boo-yah.