Increase relevance of (partial) exact matches

[fredrikekre]

I played around a bit with the new search functionality and this is issue is essentially the same request as in #2141 (comment)

In 99% of cases I know the exact function I am looking for so it would be great to increase the importance of exact matches. As it is right now it is IMO a bit annoying since you essentially have to type out the whole name until you get a match.

[mortenpi]

Cc @Hetarth02

[mortenpi]

Then filtering in #2202 should also help with that a bit. It would actually be good to get a bit of feedback on that, whether that's good UX or not.

[Hetarth02]

I am confused about what the fuzzy search distance should be. If it is very much then one can get unwanted results and if its less(the case right now) we already know as mentioned above.

We should probably try out some distances with this, but I would suggest not going farther than 3.

[mortenpi]

I think the point here is that we want the matches that match exactly to be prioritized, and fuzzy matches shown a bit lower? The exact fuzzy distance in that sense is irrelevant here.

[Hetarth02]

Hmm, so basically a mix of exact and fuzzy searches could be a good thing...?

Like have top 10 or so searches which are exact matches and others with fuzzy, sound reasonable?

[mortenpi]

Yep, I think so. I am not sure you need to limit the number of exact matches though? They should probably always be prioritized? The only thing to think about is e.g. module names.. if we have those in the "title", then they might be very repetitive.

[Hetarth02]

Also, we might need to limit one or other search because either of them can have repetitive results which we don't want.

[mortenpi]

I feel that, ideally, repetitive results should be removed, rather than working around the problem by just throwing away (potentially) correct results because were hitting some arbitrary limit.

[fingolfin]

Just switched https://juliatesting.github.io/Aqua.jl/dev to use Documenter 1.0, and tried the new search:

• test_ambiguities: unique hit found (yay)
• test_ambiguitie: unique hit found (yay)
• test_ambiguit: zero hits :-( -- old Documenter found this, down to test_ambi
• test_amb: one hit, but it is test_all (same as in old Documenter)

All in all I think that perfect prefixes need to be considered much more strongly...

(OK, old Documenter search also was weird; e.g. test_ambiguit gives a unique correct hit; test_ambiguiti (one letter more) suddenly things test_all also is a match; and test_ambiguitie (yet one letter more) suddenly has zero hits. WHAT?)
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[digital-carver]

Minisearch has a separate option for enabling prefix searches, so it looks like just adding prefix: true to searchOptions should be sufficient to solve this particular issue.

Instead of true, the option can also be passed a function, so that we search only when the user has entered at least 3 letters.

They don't specify whether prefix-matched results are ranked lower than exact matches in their docs. It seems like that should be the case based on this discussion, but that's worth verifying.

[Hetarth02]

Thanks for this, will probably look into it this weekend.

[mortenpi]

#2375