I can't figure out what field you use to sort project search results.
How are project search results sorted?
4 months ago
4 months ago
No field that you can see.
The sort is generated on the fly. It's a combination of a relevance ranking generated by tsearch2 (the stemming search index software we use) and a weighting factor based on stack counts.
The search was optimized to give good yields when searching for particular projects. I admit it's not very good at broad keyword browsing, but the main problem we wanted to solve was people looking for but not finding a known project.
3 months ago
Robin,
I see the point, but maybe there's something amiss with your relevance ranking/weighting algorithm if, for example, searching for wiki the most popular wiki engine (MediaWiki, 265 stacks) only shows up on page 2 after several projects among which an unknown Eclipse plugin, stacked by a single user. Our own wiki engine (WikkaWiki) or another pretty popular engine like MoinMoin, both show up on page 3, regardless of the number of people who stacked them (they actually come after an ugly lot of projects stacked by a single user). I find this a bit inaccurate, if the purpose of the search is to rank projects by relevance and popularity.
On a related note, the sorting criteria for user reviews are quite cryptic as well: it's pretty hard to find a review from a project's page when it's linked from the Recent Reviews section on the homepage. If you don't want to sort reviews by date (with latest first, for example), please add at least a link pointing to the #review_id, this would make it much more usable.