"exact match" package name results are easy to ignore

[eseidel]

Very similar to #8518.

Searching for "redis" the "redis" package is the 10th highest result. Maybe that's intentional? Maybe that's because it hasn't been updated in 17 months?

But also the first two matches don't have anything to do with "redis" whereas there are other results that do. You don't get to a package that really has anything to do with "redis" until the 8th match. 🤣 Maybe this is just that "search is hard, especially over small corpuses" and we should just close this 🤷

There is an attempt to link to it from the "exact match", but it's very easy to glance over the "exact match" line.

[isoos]

Hm, couple of quick observations:

neat_cache (3rd result) has redis in the description and internally it does have a redis client - though it is not exposed to the public API, not sure if that is intended /cc @jonasfj

shorebird_redis_client will rank higher if they get more use.

The query seems to be reduced to redi with a clueless de-pluralization, and matched with credit in the name or description of the other results ranking high. The de-pluralized version should probably rank lower if other versions are also present (or we should recognize words and brands).

[eseidel]

To be clear, I'm not at all here to shill shorebird_redis_client. Felix did a great job with it, but we just published the package since we couldn't find a better one, but it's not a paid product for us and we aren't really trying for users. I was actually looking to see the state of other redis clients on pub and see if we could just delete ours, and then was surprised that not only I didn't notice the "exact match" link at the top in my first scan of the page, but then that the results seemed relatively poor for such a direct query. 🤷

[isoos]

I think the difference between the two results can be highlighted when you enable exact phrase match:
https://pub.dev/packages?q=%22redis%22

It kind of gives away that we are matching much more than we should with the non-exact phrase version.

[isoos]

Also: I don't think that users should use the exact phrase match for such results, the search index should do a better job. (And again, thanks for reporting it!)

[isoos]

After a lot back-and-forth, and with the acknowledgement that we won't have a single good solution that solves each use case, we've updated the search ranking to promote the exact name match to the top position. We also display an additional ("Name match") badge that indicates if/when the position is out-of-order. (One trivial example is searching for json).