559216 - enhance advanced search to support regular expressions or google like syntax

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Search, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Eric Moore]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: 

Its tough finding add-ons on the Mozilla add-ons web site, I'm frequently resorting to using domain specific searches using google instead. It would help if the advanced search was enhanced to either support regular expressions or a google like syntax ('+', '-', '*', OR and double quote support for example). 

I suggest you add a checkbox (that is checked by default) to the advanced search pane to enable this functionality. This minimizes the risk of confusing new users (since its only in the advanced search), will alert experienced users that a new feature has been added, and lets somebody opt-out if they don't understand the syntax.

This was split off from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559201 . 

Out of curiosity, what search engine (Lucene etc.) do you use?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

Sphinx:

http://sphinxsearch.com/blog/2010/03/26/sphinx-powers-mozillas-addons-search/

Comment 3

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

We use Elastic Search now.

Comment 4

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Thanks for filing this.  In an effort to not drown in existing reports we're aggressively closing old enhancements and bugs to get the buglist to a reasonable level so we can scope and process bug sprints in an effective manner.

Patches for this bug are still welcome.