[Debtags-devel] New web interface

[Benjamin Mesing]

Hello

> I've hacked together this nice new web interface:
> 
>   http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi
> 
> It's the smart-search concept: you start with a full-text search, which
> will give a starting set of wanted tags (the most common ones in the
> search).
I think the idea is a good one - it might even work in practice :-).
I've tried a search starting with "package", "email" and "browser".
Package was a total failure (I wanted tools dealing with packages).
Email required me to remove 5 of the 6 suggested tags (though the one
left was works-with::email which is good). Browser gave me some good
results (I only had to remove GTK-UI ;-).
However I think the results could be improved by performing some kind of
scoring on the search results received by the full text search. Perhaps
adding tags which match the search expression, regardless wether they
appear often in the search results would be helpful too. Additionally I
think that it must be possible to add tags which are not proposed at one
location (without bloating the UI to much there could be a combobox,
with autocompletion).
Finally I would prefer to have the [Don't want],... entries small and
appearing underneath the tag. But this might be a matter of taste:
* Software development / programming: 
    Software Libraries
  <small>[Don't want] [Ignore] [Remove]</small>
Finally having the search box in the top right corner is not very
intuitive for the start page. Put it somewhere more visible.

All this said I think its a good idea, worth being pursued. It seems to
be really useful to allow adding a proposed tag to: "don't want" which
helps narrowing the search results really fast to what you want. 
I think this does also provide a really good approach for a real search
application (without the limitations of a web interface). Lets see if I
can use some of those ideas :-))

Best regards 

Ben