New Search Engine for plugins?

  • Hi,

    I created this topic in order to give a feedback and also to get some opinions (other than mine).
    This comes from a plugins user and also plugins developper.

    I will only talk about the new search engine / search algorithm.

    I think this recent enhancement has been made with a lot of good ideas / motivations, and it’s still the case as it is not over.

    But the results aren’t really THAT awesome, I will try to explain properly :
    If I understand well, the goal was to get search results with more relevance, but after some tests and also after reading some users/developpers feedback, the search results seem to be less relevant.
    By searching a keyword, we will find a lot of irrelevant plugins (amazing plugins for sure, but not matching the users needs) only because they are popular and I think it is side effects of initials good ideas/motivations.

    With this new search algorithm, it is like the Big Ones become bigger and the Small developpers are sent back in the search results and become smaller.

    In my personnal case, I lost like 95% of my downloads because my plugins lost 3 or 4 pages of search results.

    That’s why I wrote this topic, not to blame all those hard workers who built this amazing software WordPress, but in order to get some info, some tips or anything that could help us users and developpers.

    For example :
    – As a developper, How should we build our plugins/readme file to be efficient in the search results ? Is there some good practices about it ?
    – As a user, How should we build our search keywords to get exactly what we need ? Are you planning to add some search tools like “Popular / New / Trending” ?

    Thank you for reading my feedback, thank you for all your daily work and have a nice day.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    Can your define “less relevant” results by example? Less relevant to who? ??

    In my personnal case, I lost like 95% of my downloads because my plugins lost 3 or 4 pages of search results.

    *Looks*

    I’m not trying to be judgmental but I do not think that’s a valid statement. What are you trying to accomplish by having plugins in the WordPress repository?

    If it’s to help users then just keep doing what you are doing. People find plugins using many ways and the search hits are just a part of that. Looking at your plugins and the installation numbers it looks like many of your plugins are for a specific and limited use case.

    Thread Starter PluginlySpeaking

    (@pluginlyspeaking)

    Thanks for your answer, I totally understand your point of view and I will try to be more explicit.

    Like you said, we could understand the “less relevant” for the developper and not for the users and it could sounds selfish.

    But when you search “table” and you find for example “WooCommerce” on the first page, it is like : “Please ? I need to go to the grocery store.” and as an answer they propose you an helicopter with autopilot instead of telling you the address.
    When you search “Clean Database”, you will find on the first page a Contact Form plugin, a Guestbook plugin or a Comments plugin.

    I talked about my personnal case for an example, but I didn’t do it because I’m complaining, try to search anything and you will certainly find something close to irrelevant on the first page.

    Best Regards,
    PluginlySpeaking

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.ads-software.com Admin

    By searching a keyword, we will find a lot of irrelevant plugins

    That’s probably true. So, don’t search keywords. Real users don’t do that. They search for solutions to their problems, not for keywords.

    Pete

    (@perthmetro)

    Real users don’t do that.

    Huh? Are you for real! I’m a “real user” and I use the keyword search because ummm I thought it would be umm relevant.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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