x/pkgsite: partial search doesn't return (any) matches which are "close" or latest

[myitcv]

What is the URL of the page with the issue?

• https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=goproxytes
• https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=sh

What is your user agent?

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.66 Safari/537.36

Screenshot

For https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=goproxytes:

For https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=sh:

What did you do?

Visited either of the search results pages above.

What did you expect to see?

For https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=goproxytes I would expect to see https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/rogpeppe/go-internal/goproxytest?tab=doc in the results.

For https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=sh I would expect to see:

• https://pkg.go.dev/mvdan.cc/sh/v3/syntax?tab=doc fairly near the top of results
• the modules mvdan.cc/sh, mvdan.cc/sh/v2 and mvdan.cc/sh/v3 listed as module search results, along with packages that are "close" matches

What did you see instead?

For https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=goproxytes, zero results.

For https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=sh a number of results which I would consider "further away" than https://pkg.go.dev/mvdan.cc/sh/v3/syntax?tab=doc

FYI @mvdan

[julieqiu]

This is helpful, thanks! We are still tuning our search algorithm, so it's useful to know of these unexpected search results.

It sounds like there are a couple of suggestions here:

• Support fuzzy matching (in the case of goproxytes)
• Support searching by packages and modules.
  • For this suggestion, are you expecting to see links to both package and modules in the search results? Or a filter to search by modules instead of packages as @mvdan mentioned in x/pkgsite: searching for modules isn't supported #36814?
• Rank the newest version of a module in a series of modules, higher than older ones (i.e. mvdan.cc/sh/v3/syntax should be high up in the search results)

Also in the case of searching for sh, I'm seeing mvdan.cc/sh/syntaxas the third result, and mvdan.cc/sh/interp as the fourth. Are those results ones that you would expect?

[myitcv]

Regarding "Support searching by packages and modules"

For this suggestion, are you expecting to see links to both package and modules in the search results?

Yes. I think both should be returned, and there be some indicator (icon/colour/etc) that distinguishes a package vs a module.

Or a filter to search by modules instead of packages as @mvdan mentioned in #36814?

My sense is that it should be possible to add something like is:package or is:module to further constrain the search query but that the default should return both packages and modules.

[myitcv]

Ranking

Rank the newest version of a module in a series of modules, higher than older ones (i.e. mvdan.cc/sh/v3/syntax should be high up in the search results)

As a broad heuristic to feed into the overall ranking algorithm, this feels sensible.

Also in the case of searching for sh, I'm seeing mvdan.cc/sh/syntax as the third result, and mvdan.cc/sh/interp as the fourth. Are those results ones that you would expect?

@mvdan will confirm, but, given the previous point, I would have expected to see mvdan.cc/sh/v3/syntax above mvdan.cc/sh/syntax, i.e. the later module version's packages ranking higher than the earlier

Whilst we are here, searching for mvdan.cc/sh/v3 seems to rank non-v3 packages above v3 packages:

[eliasnaur]

Another unfortunate query is https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=gio, where I would expect the gioui.org module and packages to come near the top. However, the first appearance is on page 3, for the gioui.org/ui package:

https://pkg.go.dev/search?page=3&q=gio

linking to

https://pkg.go.dev/gioui.org/ui

which doesn't even exist anymore (I removed /ui/ from gioui.org packages a while back).