[Ayatana-dev] Searching for applications, keywords and synonyms

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi! I have a little itch to scratch :)

A while ago I sent a message off to Gnome Shell's mailing list on this
topic, but there hasn't been much feedback yet. Still hoping to get
the ball rolling, so… maybe we can start on this here!

It seems every new desktop shell promotes searching. In Unity, lots of
features are built around search, so it is important that it works
really well. Right now, the results for application search can be
pretty erratic, making it only consistently useful for getting back to
an application one already knows by name. It doesn't work for
_discovering_ an application. For example, Unity as it is cannot
reliably help someone wondering “how do I burn a music CD?”
We can do way better than that.

Right now, in Maverick's Unity, a search checks an application's Name
and Comment field. So, if an application wants to be search friendly,
its developers have to cram as many relevant words as they possibly
can into its one-sentence comment.
If I search for “photo,” I get Cheese, F-Spot, GIMP and Shotwell (in
that order).
”photos” gives me Cheese, F-Spot and Shotwell.
“camera” gives me UFRaw.
“photograph” gives me GIMP.
“photography” gives me nothing.

I think a good solution to this problem involves the standard menu
categories attached to the Desktop Menu Specification:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html
The nice thing with this is most applications already do what we want.
Poking through /usr/share/applications, I can see most apps on my
system already describe themselves with good, logical sets of
additional categories, like "Game;Simulation",
"GNOME;GTK;Graphics;Viewer;Publishing;" or
"GNOME;GTK;AudioVideo;Audio;Recorder;"

All this needs is that those categories be searchable. Right now, they
aren't, but it could be easy enough to create a centralized _thing_
that links registered menu categories to natural keywords relating to
them. So, the Photography category gets “photography, photograph,
camera, image.” (Where we make an assumption that the search system
does partial string matching).
For particular cases, comments come back into play but have a less
prominent role. Perhaps a Keywords field could be gradually phased in,
but it would be less urgent.

There are probably too many variables here to do something
particularly controlled like the card sorting exercise. I was thinking
about setting up a quick web app for people to match applications with
different keywords (and then to manually match those keywords with
categories).
Any suggestions for this? :)

As for the rest of this thought: yeah, that's what I think would work.
I'm curious if we can establish some agreement on whether search
_needs_ fixing and how to go about it.
I would love to help with this where I can, particularly figuring out
that data set (and its localisation logistics).
It would be really nice to have something portable so we can still be
consistent with how applications are presented in different desktop
environments.

Bye!
Dylan