Marketplace/Search/Q1Goals

The Marketplace has been placed into maintenance mode. It is no longer under active development. You can read complete details here.

Q1 Goals for Marketplace Search

Main driver: Rob Hudson.

Bugs tagged with "better-search" in Bugzilla.

• Improve popularity and popularity per region
  • 830902 - Adjust Popularity measure
  • 1116564 - Fix or remove regional popularity
• Add trending apps and trending apps per category
  • 1116339 - [tracker] Finish off trending apps work
• Add UI to search apps by supported language
  • 1111643 - search for supported language
• Improve searches against localized app names
  • 998070 - Improve search of the list of app names
  • 972039 - Boost on exact matches in all locales
• Add in keyword support
  • 1118541, 1118539, 1118543

The tagging/keywords/synonyms may need further discussion and refinement, but the general goal is to provide better search results for some common search terms like "games" that may not find a game if the app doesn't use the word "game" in the name or description anywhere. Elasticsearch's synonym support should either be avoided or used very sparingly to avoid cluttering the search results and making things worse.

Major difference:

• Tagging or keywords are app specific
  • maintained by the app developer
  • does stemming
  • can we just take the existing tags and expose them
  • we'll need to expose the tags on the app details page so it's clear why they exist
  • we've already got a lot of the code for this from AMO, so this is pretty easy to expose and lets developers worry about their own misspellings and synonyms

• Synonyms are global
  • maintained by an admin
  • does stemming
  • it was felt that figuring out and maintaining this list is a rather large burden we aren't really sure of the advantage yet
  • could have negative consequences to search by making it too general (e.g. user searches "poker" and gets all card games)

KPI

• How can they be measured?
  • refine search results
  • goal to an app download
  • whats our baseline today
  • we can measure this
    • number of searches that leave after a search (currently around 19%) should drop
    • number of searches that refine (currently around 58%) should drop
    • accessible in google analytics - David B is the expert here

Not in scope

• Explore a solution for tagging/keywords/synonyms and demonstrate it for the en-US locale. People can explore it, but not too worried about it for reasons stated above.
  • 928117 - Take advantage of Elasticsearch's synonym support