Plugin search results from within WP are horribly bad

[markjaquith]

The plugin search from within WordPress is bad to the point of being mostly useless.

Try to find this plugin:
​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ttisbdir/

Good luck. I gave up after scanning 15 pages of results.

Try searching authors for "jaquith" no luck. You need to know my exact WP.org username to get any results.

The search needs to weigh the title of the plugin heavily. It needs to join multiple search terms with an AND, not an OR. And the search results need to be ordered more sanely. It's frustrating that you can know the name of a plugin, enter it verbatim, and still never find it.

[DD32]

The results are the exact results which are returned from the ​Extend: Plugins bbPress installation, There is allready a custom plugin running on there to give weightings to certain items, But i agree its absolutely horrible.

Quite often the first 1-2 pages will contain nearly the same 90% of plugins as a completely different search..

Related: #8290 (ended up increasing the number of plugins from 6 to 24 per page to help with the useless search results)

[mdawaffe]

For the curious, the main reason it's so bad is because of the way the information is stored. The readme.txt file is parsed, broken into sections ( installation, description, faq, ...) and then mooshed into one big string that's stored as the post content of a bbPress post. In this string, the sections are delineated by html comments... which have very generic words in them.

Try searching for "title". You will get almost every plugin back since the string "title" appears in each of those html comments.

That, and bbPress search has always been pretty poor.

I'm working on addressing this now by setting up a ​sphinx index. This first pass will give much better results. And look for continued improvements over the coming months.

[j8h9]

One significant improvement would be to enhance the plugin categories and search capability. Today, based on another post, someone was searching for password protected pages. If I browse PAGE plugins, I have to page through 172 of them. If I search using the search plugins textbox/button, I get pages and pages of plugins—many completely unrelated to password protecting a page? Somewhat frustrating. If I search TAGS, I could not find password, protected, restricted, etc.

[DD32]

The "Tag" option is only what the plugins have tagged themselves as.. So if "Protected Posts" plugin doesnt tag itself as "Protected" then it wont show up under that.

The pages and pages of unrelated plugins are annoying to say the least, Which is what Sphinx is supposed to do.. Sort out the crud from the good.. Not sure on the progress of that, or if its up and running.

[ryan]

​http://wordpress.org/development/2009/02/new-and-improved-plugins-directory-search/