Search Woes - Better use of the available data [#1831886]

As Drupal 7 matures, it is becoming ever more difficult to find answers that are specific to one version (either 6 or 7, and in the not-too-distant future: 8) of Drupal. If I am searching for help on a problem in Drupal 7, I have to wade through a LOT of posts that are specific to Drupal 6. I was hoping that, with the installation of Apache Solr, the filter options for searches might be expanded to make Drupal.org more useful. I know there is a drop-down for version when posting in the forums, so why not add that as a drill-down filter in the sidebar of search results?

Comments

Comment #1

dkre CreditAttribution: dkre commented 16 November 2012 at 23:52

Title:	Search Woes	» Search Woes - Better use of the available data
Issue tags:		+search

I couldn't agree more about this issue, but not limited to version drill down.

I solely develop on drupal and easily spend 20% of my working hours searching for fixes or ways to achieve something. For anyone starting to work with drupal the amount of time trawling search results is immense and quite frustrating.

Where I think a huge improvement to the site could be made is with adding the location of a node/post/comment.

Currently a search results returns the type of node it is:
# Comments - Node Type
eg: 6 Comments - Issue

Adding the location of the node and the drupal version would be ideal:
# Comments - Node Type | Parent Module/Forum/Book page etc | D#
eg: 6 Comments - Issue | Feeds D7

The version could also be the current recommended release versions of a module. This would prevent the user from needlessly visiting the project page of an unmaintained or dead module.

eg: 6 Comments - Issue | Feeds 7.x-2.0-alpha7 • 6.x-1.0-beta12

Or stripped:

eg: 6 Comments - Issue | Feeds 7.x • 6.x

With this extra data as exposed filters and the addition of a view count filter, I believe drupal.org would be a lot more intuitive and drupal itself be a lot less problematic to develop with.

The view count filter is a must right now (or similar) with some of the top modules not returning appropriately in search results. A great example is feeds or backup and migrate. Searching for 'feeds' returns node: drupal.org/project/feeds on page 4 right after 'ForexFeed Realtime Currency Tickers' which has 14 sites using the module and just over 1000 downloads.

Perhaps this isn't seen as an issue but I think it's pretty fundamental to the usability of this site. Returning the results based on view count may not be the best solution however as there are probably a huge number of unmaintained/dead modules that have huge view counts on their project page simply because the module has a good name.

Small changes like this will make leaps and bounds to take drupal.org to a much more friendly place for non-developers. Drupal.org is a fantastic expression of how drupal is very developer centric and thus can be very alienating to non-developers. Nothing could help this more helpful to this than providing a better way to find information.