What's your idea?
Make popular projects easier to find from the header-search box. We could add a facet to solr for project usage and adjust that up as a relevancy factor so that items with high usage are higher in search results. When someone filters the facets to Projects we could also ignore whatever sort they have used so far and change it to be by install count.
What are the benefits?
Will not have to wade through innumerable modules with similar titles if you just want to find the most widely-used one(s). For instance, "Views" is not even on page 1 of the results when I search in the header box for "Views".
What are the risks?
I can't think of one.
How can we measure the impact of this idea? (metrics)
Number of times the pager is hit in Projects search results, perhaps.
Who directly benefits from / will use this improvement? (target audiences)
I would think that virtually anyone who is looking for modules on Drupal.org would benefit - especially newer users.
Are additional resources available for discovery/implementation? (volunteer effort, financial backing, etc.)
I would volunteer to implement this sort.
Comments
If our broken search would
If our broken search would get fixed, we wouldn't have to debate this... (https://drupal.org/node/1862196).
So I am in general for "Fix search!".
Looks like
Looks like https://drupal.org/node/1862196 is fixed in Drupal 7 and I agree with the way that drumm is not fixing bugs in d6 but letting other people do that. I'd say the higher priority than "fix search" is "upgrade to Drupal 7."
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I agree!
I consider this an essential feature. Having a search for "Views" actually display the Views module in the search results should be white-hot on this list.
Utilizing search is one of the areas a new user will first encounter Drupal's abilities and to have ApacheSolr simply not work is an embarrassment.
Here's what I did to try to
Here's what I did to try to understand this:
If you end up on https://drupal.org/project/modules/ the default search is by most installed.
What set of steps displays this issue?
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
The problem is really just
The problem is really just with the main search box in the Drupal.org header (e.g. from the d.o. home page). If you enter "Views" there (without specifying the Modules filter option), the top result is "Views Field View". Clicking the Modules filter at this point doesn't help because the default sort is "relevancy" and there's no "most installed" option. Since we're starting from a search of the full text of the site, a "most installed" option wouldn't make sense as the results include forum posts and documentation etc. However the use of the word "relevancy" in this context can be quite perplexing if the user doesn't understand what they're looking at (and it's fooled me a few times)
As you note, entering the search from module-specific locations (or using the modules filter option in the main search box) does default to Most Installed.
Actually, I just discovered
Actually, I just discovered that if you do the generic full site search and then filter the results by module, the "Most Installed" sort option does become available but unfortunately it's not the default and it wouldn't be obvious that the sort options have expanded when you chose a filter. A little UX tweaking would be useful here. i.e. when clicking the option to filter the results by module, automatically sort by most installed.
OK, makes perfect sense! I've
OK, makes perfect sense!
I've updated the title to try to make the goal broader and implementation details more clear. There are probably other solutions, but I agree that "making search better" could be a good place to spend some time, eg.:
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Sounds like a great idea! In
Sounds like a great idea! In theory you wouldn't need a “was this helpful?” button. If they click on the suggestion then it's useful. This wouldn't be too difficult to implement depending how smart you wanted the suggestions to be. They could be manually maintained and tweaked.
Thanks for pitching in
Just wanted to acknowledge greggles and the rest of you for amplifying and refining my original post. A better UX for finding specific modules is what it boils down to. I also like the original notion of having a default sort of popularity - whether it's by "most installed," "most viewed (project node)," or "hottest" (an algorithm that combines most installed/viewed with recency).
Do we have to wait to 2015?
This seems like it should be an issue in Drupal.org Customizations that folks who are interested in this idea might be able to push forward.
LewisNyman, I'm not sure how this would replace a “was this helpful?” button as I recently proposed here https://drupal.org/node/2205671
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