GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 335962
yelp search feature useless to target audience
Last modified: 2007-04-05 00:04:30 UTC
That bug has been opened on https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/yelp/+bug/30819 "I practically never use Yelp myself. Today I sat down and wondered "If I would use Yelp, what would I be looking for?". Since I will be looking for something the search feature was my first go. What would a frustrated newcomer search for? Maybe printing doesn't work for him/her. Search for "printing" and "print". What do i get? A bunch of technincal articles. The ones with interesting titles bring me to endless series of gconf commands. Perhaps the user has not discovered or understood how Nautilus cd burning goes. Search for "cd burning" and "cd writing". Loads of loads of results. Mostly about gnome games... None about cd burning as far as I could tell. So my conclusion is; if the yelp search feature only returns useless results, remove it. It will probably be one of the first places users go look for help. If it doesn't work, that's just a frustration to add to the pool." " It's also useless for a technical audience. As an example: I want to see if there are options for "echo". I search "echo" and get thousands of meaningless results. For starters, I get any page with contains the word "derecho" -- which means "right", as in "the button on the right". I scroll down and down finding nothing of use, until my head stops working. Trying to get only the man pages, I search for "man echo". Synaptic package *man*ager comes first, then lots more shit. I try to get smarter, and type "man://echo". Nothing comes out. "man:/echo". Nothing. "man:echo". Nothing. Browsing the man pages is also useless. You need to know what you want so precisely, that it is 100 times faster to type "man whatever" on a terminal."
Bug #339595 contains a big selection of changes to the search functionality. For the technical people, "man echo" with the patch goes directly to the man page for echo, as will "man:echo". For other uses, only whole words should be matched, as well as tweaking to the results. Marking this bug as a dependant.
The patch from bug #339595 has been committed. I'm going to leave this bug open as it is still relevant (to a degree). The technical stuff has been adressed but some of the other comments remain valid.
To a large extent, the poor results from the search function are not so much the fault of the search function, as problems with the stuff it's searching. For example, the problem with returning no results for "printing" in Ubuntu is because neither the Gnome help, nor the Ubuntu-specific help, *have* any pages about printing. However, I've added dependencies on making the help return better results.
Moving to Search component
In Feisty Herd (Gnome 2.17.9.1) the search in Yelp (2.16.2) works well for the examples mentioned. The searches give these results: "print" 20 results in all, first five are: Gedit Manual printing Printing, Faxing and Scanning printing, faxing and scanning Evince Document Viewer Manual to print a document GNOME 2.14 Desktop System Administration Guide To Set Print Manager Preferences Dictionary Manual print look up results "printing" 20 results in all, first five are: Gedit Manual printing Printing, Faxing and Scanning printing, faxing and scanning GNOME 2.14 Desktop System Administration Guide To Set Print Manager Preferences Dictionary Manual print look up results Evince Document Viewer Manual to print a document I think that these results are so good that this bug should be closed (I have closed it on the Ubuntu bugtracker)
I think that the search quality is so improved that this bug should be closed.
Fair enough. Thanks to Don for his excellent work!