GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 650866
Applications search filtering
Last modified: 2012-08-23 11:52:39 UTC
When searching for an application, one of the parameters which appears to be used to filter the results is the comment in the desktop file. However, this comment is not shown as there are no popups for the application search which may lead to user confusion. E.g. On my system, searching for "browse" returns results that include gitg. You and I may know what gitg does, but my mother wouldn't; yet it is returned by this search as it has "Comment[en_GB]=Git repository browser" in the desktop file. Without launching the app, she has no way of finding out why this has been returned by her search. Either making the string visible by a popup when hovering, or not filtering on a string that is invisible to the user would make the behaviour better understood.
Returning searches based on the comment is necessary. gitg does browse, so search is doing its job here. I'm not sure I'd describe this as a bug: the shell is doing its job here - returning an application that you have installed, based on an appropriate set of search criteria.
I absolutely agree that the shell is doing its job, the bug relates to the user not understanding why the shell is doing what it is doing rather than the shell doing the wrong thing. Literally the shell is right, but the user cannot tell if it is contextually right. In the example search I gave, all the user can see is an icon and the text "gitg". Unless the user knows what gitg is or what it does, there is no feedback to let them understand why the shell is showing them this application. If the comment text from the desktop file were to be shown to them then they may understand. If you think you are searching for foo, but are presented with bar with no explanation as to why, then I don't think the shell is providing sufficient information. If a mouse hover displays "bar: the new foo" then you may.
OTOH, it's very unlikely that users that don't use git will have gitg installed on their computers... ;-) That said, maybe there could be a way of showing the app comments in the list, e.g. as a tooltip. That can be useful even when not searching.
I think I'm going to change my mind on this one - it is confusing. Using comments for search terms introduces problems. (Why should "the" give me search results?!) I think the best solution to this would be to search for keywords instead. Closing this as a duplicate of bug 682529 - that should fix this problem. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 682529 ***