GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 741307
Allow the user to specify a specific search provider
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:08:08 UTC
See bug 732344 for some context. We can teach the search providers to do the keyword matching themselves, but the other option would be for gnome-shell to do it based on some keywords. It might be better to do it this way because then gnome-shell can sort the results. (It has been a while since I last looked into this, and I need to find out why the gnome-weather search provider stopped working as it once used to.)
(In reply to comment #0) > We can teach the search providers to do the keyword matching themselves Not really - you can teach the gnome-weather provider to match on "weather", but not to suppress other providers' matches. > but the other option would be for gnome-shell to do it based on some keywords. Sounds good, as long as "some keywords" is not just the provider name - something like "weather" is just too generic IMHO to belong exclusively to one app ("sorry, if you are looking for alternative weather apps, you have to search for 'forecast' or so, 'weather' is already taken ..." - same of course for "files", "music", "videos" etc.) Maybe app(lication):name? > (It has been a while since I last looked into this, and I need to find out why > the gnome-weather search provider stopped working as it once used to.) Is it enabled? The weather provider was changed to be disabled by default because it leaks location information to the network ...
One idea here too you be to let the user explicitly search a particular search provider. (this idea is kind of a more advanced user thing): 1. have something like "!" that when is typed into the search bar, shows a list of search providers in the results area. 2. the user can filter down the list of search providers, and/or select one with the mouse or arrow keys, and press tab to complete the selected one e.g. "!files ". 3. then the user completes the search e.g "!files pants.svg" and the search results are shown below. This would allow the user, if they know the keyword to type it out, and if they don't the keywords are shown for them on the screen.
There's an advantage to making this as close to natural language as we can get, rather than requiring specific operators that people need to learn. Perhaps one option would be to filter providers based on the search terms given, matching against the desktop file keywords? Not sure how that would work exactly, but the idea is that "brno weather" would only show "brno" results for apps that have "weather" in the desktop file.
(In reply to comment #3) > Perhaps one option would be to filter providers based on the search terms > given, matching against the desktop file keywords? I don't think I like that suggestion - there's just too much I can see go wrong there. As a human, it's fairly trivial to say that "weather brno" should return gnome-weather results for "brno" and "weather app" should return gnome-software results for "weather", but I doubt we can come up with a way that works good enough without actually understanding the query and knowing what kind of results a particular provider returns. Not to mention a generic provider like Web - "you can do a web search from gnome-shell for anything that does not appear in some .desktop file" doesn't sound particular obvious to me. Basically natural language is great to filter easily without learning a particular syntax, but it's also fairly easy to filter accidentally when just performing a search. > Not sure how that would work exactly, but the idea is that "brno weather" > would only show "brno" results for > apps that have "weather" in the desktop file. So should searching for "music files" filter results for gnome-music or for nautilus?
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