Consider ranking the documentation search results

[rvanlaar]

I had this experience this morning with the search results. My goals was to find the documentation on on_delete.

• I searched for on_delete: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/search/?q=on_delete

There were 10 results displayed on the first page, and 11 pages in total. 6 of those results were pre 2.x release notes.

The most promising result was result number 10: Model instance reference. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/models/instances/

Model instance reference doesn't have anything for on_delete on it's page. i.e. Phrase not found when searching

I think Django is helped by a good search system for their documentation. Therefor, consider adding a ranking of sorts that ranks the documentation.

• release notes are helpful when they are recent
• pages that don't have the queried text on them is less helpful.

[AxelitoFrostis]

I totally agree.

I think a little text underneath with the queried text and a little bit of text around would help, so you can see where the search is found.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[CuriousLearner]

This is not stale.

[pauloxnet]

I had already read this Issue and I did not find a clear proposal for improvement and it can be closed for me, but I left open in case others had a different opinion.

If you think that this issue is not stale perhaps write a motivation about it, otherwise the Issue remains open but without new information to work on.

Sorry if I only used this Issue as an opportunity to speak in general about the common practice of commenting on the issue stale without adding valid information.

[rvanlaar]

@pauloxnet I see there is a closely related issue: #1097 with which you did engage. So it seems there are more issues with the search engine used.

[pauloxnet]

@rvanlaar we're using the PostgreSQL full-text search function. All search engine need a bit of time and effort to set them up and increase it's precision and speed. For example after switching from an external search engine to PostgresQL full-text search we added multilingual search, html code removal and others features that require time and effort. We're still working to improve it thanks to user feedback and help from other volunteers.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[pauloxnet]

I think we can assign a higher rank to recent release notes.