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Advanced Search on NuGet.org

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Riad Mohamed Gahlouz edited this page Jun 30, 2020 · 1 revision

Background

Package search is a key feature on NuGet.org. Many customers asked for sorting and filtering features for the NuGet search feature Customer feedback. The sorting feature is already available for advanced users and the goal of this project is to make sorting and filtering features conveniently accessible from the NuGet.org UI.

Experience Today

Currently, it's really difficult for users to filter search results by package type. They would have to know that the feature exists and then make a manual request to the public API with the correct parameter name and value.

Advanced users can sort packages by many criteria, including:

  • relevance
  • lastEdited
  • published
  • title-asc
  • title-desc
  • created-asc
  • created-desc

As of now, there are multiple different package types and it is difficult for users to filter their search results depending on the package type. For example, it is difficult to find .NET tools and .NET templates in NuGet. In fact, people manually curated lists of .NET tools: https://github.com/natemcmaster/dotnet-tools

As for packages relevance, the current search algorithm doesn't work well if the best result's package ID is very different from common searches. For example, a search for "barcode" doesn't put the "zxing.*" packages at the top even if they are the most downloaded packages for that usage.

Goals

  • Help customers find the packages they want faster and more easily by allowing them to narrow and reorder results through filters and sorting options.

Non-Goals

  • Improve search result relevance (scoring algorithm)
  • Modify the NuGet protocol
  • Including the Visual Studio UI in the intern MVP
  • Implementing the Target Framework Moniker (TFM) filtering
  • Change the V3 API endpoint

Solution

Gallery

For the Gallery side, a new UI will be added to the search result page to be able to access the advanced search features. Here are the current mockups for our solution:

Mockup

Collapsed

Collapsed search panel

Expanded

Expanded search panel

Mobile view

Mobile view

How we chose the "Sort by" and "Package type" parameters values

The selected options for sorting were chosen because they were highly requested according to our customer feedback. For example, the "Downloads" sort option will sort the search results by the total download count of the package (in descending order). As for the "Recently updated" it would sort packages by their "latest version's creation date".

As for the package type filtering, since the field is customizable by the customer, we have many different package types that have extremely low usage.

Thus, we looked at the current count of packages in each category and included the categories that contain the majority of our hosted packages. Today, 99.3% of packages are regular .NET dependencies. If we exclude dependencies, .NET Tools are 49% of the remaining packages, and .NET Templates are 30% of the remaining packages. Other package types make up a significantly smaller portion of our packages (single digits %).

Measuring Success

Success for this feature will be measured using our existing search KPIs, adoption/usage, and customer feedback.

Today we primarily track the following metrics to gauge the success of search on nuget.org:

  • Average click index on first page (What is the average index or result order of the packages users click on?)
  • Clicks on first page % (How often do users click a result on the first page?)
  • Bounce rate (How often do users initiate a search and click on none of the results, initiate a new search, or navigate away?)

A successful advanced search feature should improve "Average click index on first page" as well as "Clicks on first page %" since effective filtering and reordering should bring desired packages higher up in the results than they would otherwise be.

It is unclear how "Bounce rate" may be affected since every applied change in filter configurations will count as a "bounce" in current telemetry. Therefore, we'll focus primarily on the other two search metrics/KPIs.

Future Work

Adding those features to NuGet.org website will allow us to collect telemetry and measure the success of the newly added feature. The learning acquired with the release of the feature will help us shape a better experience for our customers as well as design a pleasant experience for our Visual Studio users.

Adding more advanced searching criteria and filtering by specific fields are also features we are considering implementing to help our customers have a more customized experience.

We also think that filtering packages by Target Framework Moniker (TFM) would be a useful addition that will help customers in their usage of our platform as well as help us in the future for implementing features such as package compatibility search (searching for packages that are compatible with our project).

Customer feedback

Contributing

What's Being Worked On?

Check out the proposals in the accepted & proposed folders on the repository, and active PRs for proposals being discussed today.

Common Problems

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