Improve search on code.dlang.org

[pbackus]

Description

The search feature on code.dlang.org often fails to return relevant results for the user's query.

• Packages whose names include the search term as a substring are not found.
• A search for the exact name of a package sometimes fails to find it.

What are rough milestones of this project?

Fixing the issues linked above, dlang/dub-registry#93 and dlang/dub-registry#417.

How does this project help the D community?

Improving code.dlang.org's search would make it easier for D programmers to find existing packages to use and/or contribute to.

Recommended skills

Web application development.

Point of Contact

@s-ludwig, @Geod24, @WebFreak001

References

Previous attempts:

• Enable partial search dub-registry#481
• Fixed deprecations and experimental in-memory search dub-registry#497

[elementgreen]

I'm also very much interested in improving the search on code.dlang.org. In particular because it doesn't do sub-package searches and my project giD has all of its library bindings as sub-packages.

With how bad the search feature is, I think D developers are truly missing out on potential libraries which already have D implementations and prospective D developers could even be getting turned away because they don't see support for a library they want to use (such as Gtk 4).

Has there been any other activity with efforts to improve things?

After looking at the dub-registry code and the fact it uses MongoDB, I am considering writing a standalone search engine as a service. It could mirror the package data and provide a REST API which could be embedded in the official site and have it's own web page as well.

[0xEAB]

I’d just use an established search engine/database for this, e.g. meilisearch.
Sounds more maintainable than rolling your own.