x/pkgsite: searches for standard library packages should surface and prioritize v2 versions

[cespare]

What is the URL of the page with the issue?

https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=rand

What is your user agent?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Screenshot

What did you do?

I searched for "rand".

What did you see happen?

The top search results were the standard library's math/rand and crypto/rand packages. The math/rand/v2 package, which is what I mean by "rand" in most new code I write today, does not appear in the list of search results. The only indication of math/rand/v2 is some small, easy-to-miss text below the math/rand search result which says:

Related packages in the standard library: math/rand/v2

What did you expect to see?

I think that if I search for "rand", math/rand/v2 ought to be very highly ranked in the search results; ideally, it would appear above math/rand. v2 is what people ought to be using for new code and we should nudge people in that direction. In any case, it should certainly appear near the top of the list.

I think this is just a case where pkgsite isn't keeping up with the v2 evolution happening in the standard library. As we get more v2 packages, the issue will get worse.

This is essentially the standard library equivalent of an issue I filed for third-party modules a few years back: #36969.

There's also a related, thornier issue: if I search for "math/rand", it takes me directly to https://pkg.go.dev/math/rand -- perhaps that ought to go to a search result page now that includes math/rand and math/rand/v2.

[gabyhelp]

Related Issues and Documentation

• x/pkgsite: search for math/rand should answer with math/rand/v2 too #66452
• x/pkgsite: search ranking ought to prioritize more recent major module versions #36969 (closed)
• x/pkgsite: search doesn't find "std" #63454
• x/pkgsite: searching exact standard library package names #64358

_{(Emoji vote if this was helpful or unhelpful; more detailed feedback welcome in this discussion.)}

[cespare]

#66452 is the "related, thornier" issue I mentioned at the end.

[hyangah]

cc @jba