[scopes] Apps search results often seem irrelevant

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu 15.04 r207

In the Apps scope:

1. Search for "me".
What you get: Camera, Clock, Media Player, Messaging, Sudoku.
What you should get: Media Player, Messaging.

2. Search for "ca".
What you get: Calculator, Camera, External Drives, Phone, Weather.
What you should get: Calculator, Camera.

Nobody would ever try to find the Camera app by typing "me", or the Weather app by typing "ca".

------ UX Comment ------

This is part of a bigger redesign project (Scopes toolkit and scopes filters) and it can't be fixed as a single bug. The desired resolution and specs will be updated as soon as they are available.

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

I understand why this would be confusing, lets see how we can fix it.

The technical reason for the matches are because we search for app names, but also descriptions.
Do you have a suggestions on how to handle that?

[Alejandro J. Cura (alecu)]

Actually, the scope is searching in the (possibly translated) Keywords= field of the .desktop file. And it's doing partial matches, that's why it's finding the "External Drives" app when there's a match on "SDCard", eg:

/usr/share/applications/ciborium.desktop:Keywords=SDCard;Drive;Format

I still think the scope should be looking inside the Keywords field, because it's not always the case that the user knows the exact name of the app he's trying to find. But perhaps results should be annotated with the keyword that was found?

[Alejandro J. Cura (alecu)]

Btw, the Keywords= fields in existing .desktop files are a mixed bag. Some have decent content, some don't.

Here is a list of the preinstalled ones in krillin:

English keywords: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/11095533/
Spanish keywords: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/11095541/

After trying a few searches like the ones pointed out by mpt, I believe the scope should drop mid-word matches (eg: "ca" should not return "Authenticator").

But still, I think keyword matches are good (eg: returning "The Weather Channel" when the user searches for "Forecast"). If results were shown in a list (like searching in the store scope), perhaps the found keyword could be shown in a light gray subtitle.