Juju GUI search is unabashedly awful

[Dustin Kirkland ]

I tried to find another bug to pile onto, but no single bug captured the heart of darkness I feel toward the Juju GUI's search functionality, so I'm opening a new one to let the vitriol flow. (I mean this with all the love and humor I can muster.)

Search the Juju GUI for a charm or a bundle (CloudFoundry, Hadoop, OpenStack), and you are almost certain to get back all the wrong results. I'm seeing results from an Oneiric branch, ancient, unmaintained ones, and other totally wrong "answers", when there actually is a "correct", "best" answer for each of these.

Help, please. There has to be a better way forward... Thanks! Dustin

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

Dustin there is hope! I'm marking this one in progress as Jeff has just this week started to look into this. With the new jujucharms.com is a new api on the juju charmstore allowing us to deprecate the old manage.jujucharms.com and its api. The new api allows for much more more refined api response for faster results, better filtering, and more sane defaults. Jeff is currently working on moving the Juju GUI search to the new api and we'll be in a position to help this out a ton very soon.

So to set expectations, the new api

- is a lot faster
- does not provide search results for unsupported series
- has a different elasticsearch schema to help provide some better results

However it's still know to be lacking

- boosting of bundles in the result set
- boosting for matches to a series and other fields
- the new api treats ~charmers/trusty/mysql and /trusty/mysql as two different charms atm

These are known issues that are on the docket for the next two weeks of work for the api as well and so search there should improve in time for a much better experience to land with the GUI in the next GUI release.

If you can Dustin, do a search for your items on jujucharms.com and let me know if those results are better. Please file bugs against that, at https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/jujucharms.com/issues, if not and we'll make sure that while we're working on the search api we get improvements in to help these use cases.

You can test what would be returned in the

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

So for the ones you mentioned:

https://jujucharms.com/q/hadoop
https://jujucharms.com/q/cloudfoundry
https://jujucharms.com/q/openstack

The other issue doing that reminded me is that we've not pulled the historic download counts from the old system in yet so we're prepared to, but not yet sorting things by popularity as well.