Search

As an Owner, I should be able to see the searches that have happened in my Space: The Use Case here is the Spirit Island FAQ, to see what people are looking for, but it's probably interesting for anybody running a public site.

Comments should be searchable: This is clearly desireable, but hard, so it's not clear when it will be done.

Compress text in-memory: The high concept is as the title says: compress all of that text while it is in RAM

I should be able to define search queries with logical combinators: That is, when I'm saying that I want to do a search, I'd like to be able use AND and OR in some fashion.

I should be able to specify the priority of different Properties in _search: The high concept is that not every Property always matters equally when searching. We already automatically give extra weight to Name; we could expose that as a more general capability for end users.

I shouldn't need to specify _self on the properties in _search: It's just plain annoying, and the source of mysterious bugs.

Need feedback that Search terms need to be at least three characters: Chad noticed that if you search on a two-character string (such as "Ur" in the Period Games Space) you get no results, but you also get no feedback that you have to give at least three characters.

Rebuild Search along more-modern lines: While v2 of the search engine is a little better than the first version, it bears no resemblance to a real search engine. We can do better.

Rewrite Search: The current implementation of Search is kind of braindead. We can do better.

Search isn't searching Stylesheet CSS: See the comments on Rebuild Search along more-modern lines for the initial discussion.

Search should be sensitive to whole words: Chad noticed that, in the Period Games Space, he can't search for "Ur" to the get to The Game of Ur. That's because we currently have a three-char minimum, and that in turn is because we're doing simply substring matches. But if we had proper whole-word matching, and pushed those hits to the top, this would be a much more valid search term.

Search with model filter letting in an odd result: See the details; Eric is getting a weird result from a call to search in the Spirit Island FAQ.

Some text searches take far longer than others: In the Spirit Island FAQ, some specific searches take a pathologically long time, while others are basically instantaneous. Why?

_search produces duplicate results if you specify multiple models or properties: As now rewritten, the Search functionality is supposed to only produce one hit per Thing. But due to the way it's implemented, if you specify a List of models or properties to _search, it winds up running Search multiple times. So this needs some rewrite.

I should be able to do an "inline search" from QL: That is, there should be a _search() function that happens synchronously inside a QL expression, and lets you process the results yourself.

I should be able to embed a search box in a page: Eric points out that, on mobile, the main search box gets folded up, so he'd like to be able to put it somewhere specific in his page.

I should be able to get a unified search result for a given Thing: That is, instead of getting separate results for each Property, it would make more sense to get a single result per Thing, broken down by Property.

I should be able to get unreified Tags in my Search results: This is a key feature for Eric's Spirit Island FAQ.

Search should include Tags: Eric observes that the Search box doesn't hit unreified Tags. It probably ought to do so, although we'll have to think about how that displays.