Implement a "teleportation" or "jump-to" feature

[Christian Reis]

Getting to different contexts in Launchpad is hard; it requires moving around the hierarchy, often bookmarking and url-hacking. This is a strawman proposal for a generic Jump to: entry box that would allow you to go where you wanted.

The first phase implementation would be to do a query across a set of tables for a name that matched the string entered. The set of queries would be static and determined through research (but would definitely include Product and Person for instance). If ambiguous results occurred the teleportation would fail.

In the next phase, if ambiguous results occurred, the teleportation would display a page with the matching results.

In the next phase, we could do fancier substring matching.

In the next phase, we could also pick up special words like "bug", "code", "translate" and "translation". So if you entered "translate firefox" you'd end up in the right place.

[Steve Alexander (stevea)]

async ajax might be a good optimisation here.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Launchpad contains many large collections of things (packages, bugs, products, etc) where the only practical way of finding them is by searching. So many people will assume that any omnipresent text field is a global search function, no matter how it is labelled. <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010513.html>

(We see this, for example, with the people who search for packages etc in the front page search, come up against "x product does not use Malone" messages, then complain that they can't find anywhere that will let them report a bug.)

If we instead had an omnipresent field where "If ambiguous results occurred the teleportation would fail", that would make people think our search was useless, even while we didn't have one, and even if we later made it the Best Search Evar.

So can we please, please, please start work on a global search instead? Launchpad not having one is like the Yellow Pages not having one. Sure you can navigate by categories instead, but life's too short.

The teleportation idea would be excellent as an "I'm Feeling Lucky"-style button going to the first search result, but only once we have good search as a fallback.

[David Allouche (ddaa)]

I most heartily agree with Matthew. Good global searching is more important that teleportation, teleportation will be mistaken for bad global searching, and it's very difficult to change the mind of people who had bad initial impressions and the people they have talked to.

The first phase should be good global searching.

The second phase should probably be something a bit fancier than "I'm feeling lucky", but I think it's premature to think about it now.

Teleportation would be useful for quick-search bookmarks to people who are familiar with the ontology of Launchpad, but presenting it to all users as something that looks like a global search would be harmful.