GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 692663
"Reverse Order" is misleading for results sorted by relevance
Last modified: 2016-03-01 17:33:51 UTC
A bug reporter (bug 688772) was seemingly confused about the meaning of "Reverse Order" in the context of search results, and thought that defaulting to "Reverse Order" was a bug. "Reverse order" means "descending order" when sorting numbers, but this meaning of "Reverse order" is misleading when talking about search results sorted by relevance, because it is the "proper order". Anyway, I don't see any use case for ascending relevance ordering ( = least relevant result first). In my opinion, when items are sorted by relevance, "reverse order" should be enforced and the menu option should not be available.
"Reverse Order" being defined as "descending order" is problematic when sorting by Date as well: bug 687270 I also wonder about sort by size. I'm inclined to say that descending is more useful than ascending, because one may be looking for which files are taking more space. A stretchier reason is that content-richer files tend to be larger, and folders with more items tend to be more important.
Created attachment 242530 [details] [review] Sort time in descending order by default
Created attachment 242531 [details] [review] Sort search relevance in descending order by default
Created attachment 242533 [details] [review] Sort search relevance in descending order by default
Created attachment 242534 [details] [review] Don't user reverse order on Recent, Download, Trash and Search results
I don't know C, but I've tweaked some of the logic and it seems to work. I'm sorry if this is totally wrong.
Hey thanks for the patches! If I knew we had these patches I wouldn't implement my owns... so sorry it took so long to have an answer. I'm closing the bug as fixed since I fixed a few months ago.