Suboptimal Snap Store Search Strategy
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Snap Store Server |
Triaged
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
It appears that searching for Snaps is not relevance-based at all. Basically, if the search string is in the description, it is returned. So if a snap is popular and/or has a long description, it can have more hits and be on the top of the results.
While BeeKeeper Studio is a nice Snap, I find it popping up in search results that it should not be in at all. For example, typing in 'git' or 'cli' will both return BeeKeeper Studio as one of the top 2 results. Entering in something random like `sup` will also return Beekeeper Studio.
So what's happening here?
There are 2 major problems with searching.
( 1 ) Non-relevance: `cli` and `sup` are the (unintended) starting substrings for `client` and `support` from which are words within the snap's description. While `sup` was random, `cli` is a valid search term for command-line interface that should result in seeing CLI type snaps.
( 2 ) Source Control: Github is commonly used by developers, and the snap's description will typically include something related to a Github link. While the snap itself has nothing to do with Github itself, these snaps shouldn't be displayed when searching git-related terms.
While #1 can be mostly solved by using relevance searching, #2 above is a more fundamental design issue. The descriptions probably shouldn't even contain information like this, but developers want this information shown. Possibly extending the YAML syntax to allow for separating of this information could be looked into.
Changed in snapstore-server: | |
importance: | Undecided → Medium |
status: | New → Triaged |
tags: | added: search |