How to boost site-search/autocomplete

[peterbe]

We don't have a search yet but I have a prototype for an autocomplete widget that can be used to navigate by typing in parts of the title. A flaw with this is that when the search input is small, there's no good way to decide which page to show first. For example "fo" should probably should probably present JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/forEach ahead of Web/API/MediaKeyStatusMap/forEach because the latter is so much more popular.

[peterbe]

One solution to boost is to use Google Analytics and some scripting. A cron job could download all the relative popularity of pages, by URI, and then when we build the titles.json file we inject the score there. Only Mozilla MDN will have this information available so if/when we build something like this we need to make it so it's optional for local development. Or at least easy to mock/fake.

[peterbe]

If you want to play along, here's a titles.json file with 14,808 titles: https://www.peterbe.com/stumptown-renderer/issue-49/without-popularity/titles.json

Here's the same file but with not just a string but with a popularity: https://www.peterbe.com/stumptown-renderer/issue-49/with-popularity/titles.json

[peterbe]

I have a working solution for this. It's early stages but it seems very promising.