Hi fokes,
I wanted to share my ideas on the search application.
The results don't really show a lot of information right now.
The field "located in" is confusing to many users, as it does not show the
path but the wiki, the space and the page the page itself/the attachment is
in. At the very least, when the search does not expand to multiple wiki's,
the 'location' should not start with "xwiki" (everything is at
'xwiki').
I can imagine showing the sniplet of text that matches the search query
would be difficult to program, or even the first 200 chars of that page.
Showing tags in the found page would probably be a better addition showing
info on the result page.
For attachments, only a 'paperclip' is shown while in the attachment pane,
a symbol for image, ms-word etc is shown.
Matching words could be emphasised (bold or italic) in the results, so it's
easy to spot why it was a result. Especially when tags and a sniplet of the
content is shown.
Results from the 'current' space the user was in might be shown on top,
too. Like Delicious shows results from the user's stack as the first 3
results, followed by the 'general' results. The logic to me is that a user
wants pages from the space he originated his search from, as that's the
topic he is currently interested in (eg he starts his search in the space
'best practices', he might be most interested in best practices.
As my proposed improvements no doubt mean more processing time, I'd
decrease the results to 15 per page. Users hardly look further than the
first 10 anyway.
I hope I can get your thoughts on these improvements so I might promote
this to feature requests in JIRA :)
Greets, Joris