Improve documentation search fuzziness

[0joshuaolson1]

I'd love to see better searching. Besides the lack of search for the book itself, Search filters out some characters without telling you; e.g. C++ and [Unstable] are reasonable search terms, but the first gives false positives by using C and the second isn't indexed?

Related: the search box says that ? gives more options, but it just lists everything like a wildcard.

[steveklabnik]

1 is a duplicate of #22786

[0joshuaolson1]

@steveklabnik Thanks, I narrowed the issue a bit.

Another example that brought me back here: searching for 'http' returns several results!

...for heap and help, which are 50% wrong.

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P.S. I still don't get what the search bar's '?' for more options... tip was supposed to mean, so does that deserve an issue?

[sinkuu]

You can quote the word if you don't want fuzzy search. (broken on stable though)
https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/?search=%22http%22

[steveklabnik]

P.S. I still don't get what the search bar's '?' for more options... tip was supposed to mean, so does that deserve an issue?

Type ? on a doc page, and you'll get a modal.

[0joshuaolson1]

Ah, that explains the 'S' too. I wouldn't have tried them outside of the text box, because the hints were inside the text box. Cool, though!

[QuietMisdreavus]

Triage: the current rustdoc search uses basic Levenshtein edit distance when looking for items in the search index, with a maximum distance of 3 (unless the search term is a substring of the result). I'm not totally sure of other advances in fuzzy test searching, but if they can be implemented in JavaScript, we can certainly give them a shot.